By Fr Dwight Longenecker
One of the sure fire ways to create a successful story is to cast your main character as the underdog. The storyteller aims to create empathy between the audience and the hero, and there is no more effective way to do this than to have the hero be a child.
Countless stories, films and fairytales center on the child hero, and if the hero can also be a lost child or an orphan so much the better. Who’s heart is not touched immediately by the pathos of a lost child? Who does not immediately identify with the little one searching for his family, the boy or girl who has to overcome some great challenge; the child lost in the woods, trying to make the long journey home or the perennial plot line of the hero’s search for his father?
Charles Dickens is a master of creating heroes who are “little ones”. Pip from Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Martin Chuzzlewit are all orphan boys and Nell Trent (Old Curiosity Shop) and Esther Summerson (Bleak House) round off the list of Dickens’ waifs and strays. Each one goes on a journey of growing up — a journey to find both independence and a home.
For his Narnia tales C.S. Lewis creates the Pevensey children who are orphaned later in the saga and both Eustace Clarence Scrubb and Polly Plummer are lonely…