Minor characters wander into, then swiftly out of, the plot of most novels and short stories, sometimes forcibly presenting the key of the story, but oftentimes slipping through naturally, silently weaving themselves into the narrative tapestry dominated by the main characters. Among the most intriguing minor characters in Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus and The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac visited in the forms of children. In addition to their plot functions, the child characters in these novels serve their authors in great literary capacity. These kids bring forth messages not only necessary to their stories, but messages that extend into social commentary on the differences between mainstream American culture in the early 1960s and the still-submerged counterculture. The first child Roth introduces to his narrator, Neil, is Miss Julie Patimkin. She is the second spoiled princess of the Patimkin family, and the target of big sister Brenda’s jealousy. Neil describes her: "ten, round-faced, bright, who before dinner, while the other little girls on the street had been playing with jacks and with boys and with each other, had been on the back lawn putting golf balls with her father" (Goodbye, Columbus, 15). Ironically, Roth portrays Julie as a smaller version of Brenda, allowing Neil and the reader a more objective look at Brenda’s character as the perfect little girl trained by her daddy to win at every game she plays in life. Like so many other new American suburbanites of the time period, the Patimkin parents have earned success, and have therefore shifted their focus to insuring the next generation a comfortable life without frivolous worries. They seem to have found the perfect template for "successful," though necessarily identical, children, as personified by their youngest. The other visible child in Goodbye, Columbus Neil refers to as "the colored kid," who comes from the ghetto into Neil’s library to imagine himself in the Gauguin’s exotic Tahiti, though Neil’s superiors distrust the boy’s motive for spending hours in the art book section. In allowing Neil’s sympathy toward the boy, Roth not only greatly develops his main character but draws a tight parallel between the boy’s attraction where people of his race can live beyond oppression and Neil’s desire to be part of the Patimkins’ upper-class Jewish world. This is shown explicitly when Neil, in a dream, sees himself and the boy on a lonely boat floating away from an island. He relates, "…though we did not want to go, the little boy and I, the boat was moving and there was nothing we could do about it" (53), foreshadowing both his own breakup with Brenda and the disappearance of the boy’s Gauguin book. Here Roth uses the vivid portrait of a child to highlight his novel’s message of class prejudice in a democratic nation that proclaims freedom from that distinction. Children also play their role in the journey of Jack Kerouac’s Ray Smith, narrator of The Dharma Bums. First we view an intimate scene in the North Carolina woods between Ray and his nephew Little Lou, escaping from the pressures of a family that does not understand his Buddhist, unemployed lifestyle. Kerouac is clearly drawing on Whitman’s "Song of Myself," Section 6: "A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full// hands," as Ray and Little Lou turn identification of a pine cone into freeform poetry. Of Sean Monahan’s baby girl, who alone accepted Ray’s meditation at parties by a simple assent of gibberish, Ray says, "Sometimes I preferred taking her for little magic walks in the yard, holding her hand, to sitting yakking in the living room" (187). Encounters with children in The Dharma Bums, though brief, occur at times when those around Ray seem to doubt him. Even in a scene in which Ray scares local boys by pretending to be a ghost, Kerouac uses the unquestioning power of innocent faith to reinforce narrator credibility, essential to delivering the many cosmic messages of the free-flowing narrative novel. Goodbye, Columbus and The Dharma Bums are stories of one period in time but two very separate cultures: the suburban, consumer, family majority and the dissenting, alternative stragglers of the Beat Generation whose spirit would fully emerge in the counterculture of the later 1960s. Roth, in Goodbye, Columbus, uses his minor child characters as bold, important, fully developed symbols. This reinforces the mantra of millions of America’s Patimkin families: Children are the most important possession, because they are the future. Raise your children to be just like you, to continue the prosperity of the family line and support the great nation that has rewarded your hard work. Kerouac’s young Dharma Bums, in contrast, skip into the story to deliver their little sermons and soon fade away. In the world of the hitchhiking poets and their protesting brothers, the social emphasis is on the current generation, the young people who can save, or change, America themselves. Things, certainly, can be better for the next generation, but the responsibility lies not with the children’s ability to remain in the higher social class of their parents, only with those who can make a difference now. The roles of the children in these two novels rise naturally from their different stories; the comparative strengths and weaknesses of any generation are revealed through those of its children.
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