Childhood Portrayed in Miller and Salinger

Inside The Heads of Boys: "Bulldog" and "The Laughing Man"

Sep 8, 2009

A look at how two of the greatest literary voices in modern American fiction wrote the stories of boys in the early 20th century.

J.D. Salinger and Arthur Miller both wrote masterful stories about middle school-aged boys, which take place in early 20th century New York City. Their approaches to narration, in “The Laughing Man” and “Bulldog,” were very different but equally successful.

"Bulldog," by Arthur Miller

“Bulldog” follows a boy’s adventure through Brooklyn to buy a puppy he read was for sale in the newspaper—a simple children’s story premise—and then follows the boy through his first sexual encounter, followed by his first feelings of internal separation from his family. It is eventually a story about the melancholy and excitement that come with the first inklings of growing up.

Third Person Narrator in Miller

Miller used a third person limited narrator, an adult voice closely following events as seen and felt by a nine-year-old boy. “Bulldog” begins with the boy reading the newspaper, and as the classified section comes into view, we understand the distance from which the narrator speaks. The first line begins, “He saw this tiny ad…” with that “tiny” we see the ad too, and feel ourselves very close indeed to the boy’s p.o.v.

Narrator’s Distance From Subject

The narrator shows us very subtly that he is older than the boy by articulating with perfect clarity the experiences the boy is having, which the boy himself would not have been able to explain in such a clear way. The boy’s feelings are somewhat muddled and vague, and the narrator describes the feelings in plain and simple language, giving the illusion that the boy also understands them. On page seven, when the boy picks up the puppy, it feels “hot on his skin and very soft and kind of disgusting in a thrilling king of way.” This is a very intimate description, and not something the boy could have said at the time, but it’s almost “boy language,” so it does not jar us out of the scene, or out of the boy’s head.

"The Laughing Man," by J.D. Salinger

“The Laughing Man” is told in first person, from the distance of an adult looking back on a time in his childhood decades earlier. The story follows a group of boys in Manhattan who are in an afterschool program run by a law student they call “The Chief.” Each day the boys are driven around the city in a bus, taken to museums and to parks to play baseball, and told an ongoing story called “The Laughing Man.”

Salinger’s First Person Narrator

The narrator in this story describes scenes with tremendous attention to detail, and like Bulldog’s narrator, he speaks with a precision the boy in the scene (here his younger self) would not have been able to offer at the time. On page three, “then he straddled his driver’s seat backward and, in his reedy but modulated tenor voice, gave us the new installment of, “The Laughing Man.”

Miller’s Authentic Children’s Point of View

Unlike the narrator in “Bulldog,” Salinger’s speaker occasionally pops out of the story to offer some side information—on page eight, “Offhand, I can remember seeing just three girls in my life who struck me as having unclassifiably great beauty at first sight…” This gives the story a meandering feeling, which makes it feel authentic, since real stories people tell you about their childhoods are not mapped out too closely in advance.

The Child’s World In Salinger

The narrator in Salinger’s story is recalling something that happened when he was a kid that left a lasting impression on him, but that he didn’t quite understand at the time and still doesn’t. The story ends with "The Chief' breaking up with his girlfriend and making the boys cry by inventing an upsetting, violent ending to the story he had been telling them. There is no neat tie-up of meaning at the end, but rather the sense of a spell broken. The narrator’s distance gives the story a dream-like quality, and calls to mind the troubling, mysterious adult problems that break apart childhood fantasies of how the world is.

Lasting Impressions

The closeness of the narrator to the subject in “Bulldog” works in a different way: by bringing into light the specific emotional changes people go through during puberty that people do not generally articulate at any time. So while “The Laughing Man” enthralls readers by its feeling of familiarity and authenticity, “Bulldog” goes out on a wild limb, revealing the wires and screws behind muddy emotional changes people go through when they start to grow up.

The copyright of the article Childhood Portrayed in Miller and Salinger in Modern American Fiction is owned by Eva Gordon. Permission to republish Childhood Portrayed in Miller and Salinger in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.