The Self-Sufficient Teenage Character: Jean George's Sam

A number of years ago, my mother commented that she found the behavior of a set of characters unrealistic due to their age. The characters were Jamie and Sammy from Cynthia Voigt's Sons from Afar. I didn't disagree. However, since I liked the final confrontation--in which Jamie and Sammy face down men in a bar--I simply increased the ages of the brothers in my head. (The cover makes both young men considerably older than their ages in the book.)

However, the issue underlies a great many plots. To a degree, readers accept the independent decision-making of teens in fantasy literature. The tropes require that they act alone without adult supervision. And historically, teens have often been left to their own devices, for good or for ill, whether anyone appreciated the gesture or not. When Bianca mentions in Last Man Standing that she was once a shift manager but when "you're ten, you just want to go out and play," she is echoing a historical reality. 

On the other hand, the brain literally doesn't stop forming until the late teens to early twenties--which is why forcing a young teenager to make a life-altering decision is bad sense at the very least and evil at the very most. The executive part of the brain that decides NOT to bungee-jump off a cliff using curtain cords begins to make itself felt. 

Between childhood and young adulthood are a number of steps. Kids begin to ask "big" questions regarding abstract ideas from ten to eleven. Before then, when a child says, "What does it mean to die?" the child likely means, "So, is that worm really dead or what?" though adults often leap to the more abstract problem. 

Even at ten to eleven, how abstract depends entirely on the child's exposure and experience, including the kinds of stuff the child hears around the dinner table. I remember conversations about religion at home when I was that age. I didn't form full--and layered--opinions on the issues until much later. 

As for confidence, I suggest that the degree of confidence held by a child comes done to mimicry and experience or lack thereof. In some ways, young children are more confident on camera--and more natural--because they exist pre-self-conscious adolescence. They will also mirror what they know and see.

In His in Herland, when my editor expressed doubts about my narrator's reflections (would a thirteen-year-old boy truly be that objective?), I shifted the time of the narration to later. He is the same character looking back. He admits that at the time, he simply did what was expedient and fit his interests. At one point, regarding his mentors, he reflects,

"Still, there’s something to be said for a society that doesn’t dissolve into Twitter wars at every turn, hysteria followed by self-praise. My strong feelings is the ultimate savagery—so states my Troas upbringing. I didn’t think that at fourteen going on fifteen any more than I considered the impact of social pressure on moral thought. I didn’t think about comparing cultures. There was nothing to compare. Life was what it was. I wanted to run across the world without stopping. Upend everything. Offer me a weapon, I’d have taken it."

Jamie and Sammy, however, are behaving with diplomacy, insight into human behavior, and mature confidence in the moment. How likely is that a response from a 12 and 15/16-year-old? (I think there is more than one answer to that question!)

What about Sam from My Side of the Mountain? 

I reread the book recently and found it as enchanting as I did as a youngster.

I'm not entirely sure I believe in it. Sam is drawn, by the author, as about fourteen. Wikipedia states he is twelve. He sounds about eighteen. He performs tasks that are possible for a self-possessed fourteen-year-old--to a degree. 

That is, I was able to buy into almost everything that he accomplishes--except skinning the deer. 

George has a decent scene where Sam nearly kills himself from carbon dioxide poisoning when he starts a small stove fire in the tree home. He badly frightens himself. In addition, several times he points out that he made mistakes the first month. And he picked up just about everything he did or knew from books. 

Yet George presents Sam as able to properly skin a deer without the result turning into a weird, smelly, grub-infested mess the first time around. 

Again, Sam has no prior practical experience. And I'm afraid that this is one place where I think that it would take Sam about ten deer before he would master the procedure and achieve a lack of non-rotting grossness--so he can make himself a deer suit. 

However, the impulse to leave, to head out, to try to live off the land is an impulse that I  believe could reside in, okay, a fourteen-year-old (again, I increased the age in my head). Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild explores this impulse. The issue is not a hatred of parents--as George properly emphasizes--but an eagerness to head out into the unknown. 

Just--it helps to remember that the young man that Krakauer chronicled died from mistaking one plant in his book for another.