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The Riddle of Peter's Existence

What is a boy who doesn't grow up

By Ari GrossmannPublished 4 years ago 10 min read
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All children, except one, at some point ask, “Who am I?” They all know on some level that they are human, that they are a child and that they will one day be a grown up. This latter piece of knowledge occurs to them at about two, because two is the beginning of the end. Except for Peter. Peter has no end and no clear beginning for that matter. Peter knows that he is a child, a boy to be specific, but he will never become a grown up, a feat which is really rather impossible for a human. Peter knows this, which is why Peter doesn’t ask “Who am I?” but “What am I?” What is a boy who doesn’t grow up?

Aging is a natural cyclical process that defines life. A boy who isn’t following that process can’t be considered fully alive; at the very least he couldn’t be considered human, except that in my opinion, Peter’s desires, personality flaws and internal struggles, make him very human. The longer Peter is with Wendy, the more self-actualizing and human he seems to become. For instance, after Peter has spent some time with Wendy, they and the Lost Boys go to the mermaid’s lagoon and the pirates attack. Peter demonstrates care for someone that isn’t just himself, with no clear selfish motive. Peter’s wounded and he and Wendy are about to drown, a kite appears and he says, “It lifted Michael off the ground, why should it not carry you?” Wendy argues with him, attempting to get him to go instead, but he replies, “And you are a Lady; never…Goodbye, Wendy” (85). Peter has no selfish motive to save Wendy; he just cares about her. Saving Wendy would, without a miracle, cost him his life. Up until that point Peter had been using Wendy as a mother figure. When he had first brought her to Neverland and she nearly died because of Tootles, Peter’s first desire had been to walk away and leave her there and never go back (57). Once he had discovered that she was actually alive, he “was begging Wendy to get better quickly so he could show her the mermaids” (57). He wants to ignore the problem and walk away like she was no one important, and once he knows she’s alive, he has a purely selfish and self centered reason for her to get better. At the lagoon there is no self-centered motivation. Even if Wendy survives, she could no longer be his mother because he’d be dead. Had Peter left Wendy on the rock, he could have more adventures and just find another mother. But Peter won’t do that because he’s not the only one he cares about anymore. Peter’s world has expanded beyond just himself. He has grown, the same way babies and very young kids do, from being the only one that matters in the world to caring about someone else—meaning he has gotten closer to being a real human.

While Peter wants to be his own person and does begin the process of growing into a real human, he is always forced to reset into a symbol because of the way those outside of his path view him. Aside from the Darling women, to everyone Peter is simply a character of legend or the inhabitant of the dream realm. Mrs. Darling remembers a childhood story of “a Peter Pan who was said to live with the fairies. There were odd stories about him, as that when children died he went part of the way with them, so that they should not be frightened” (8). In Mrs. Darling’s childhood, Peter was believed to be some form of Grimm Reaper, or more accurately Chiron, a guide through death. Having a guide to the afterlife is a common archetype in many different mythologies. Mrs. Darling and those in her childhood believed Peter to be this archetype and symbol. However, the meaning of Peter as a symbol has changed as time’s gone by. When Mrs. Darling first saw Peter in her dream, “He did not alarm her, for she thought she had seen him before in the faces of many women who have no children” (10). The narrator expands upon Mrs. Darling’s observation by adding, “if you or I or Wendy had been there we should have seen that he was very like Mrs. Darling’s kiss” (10), making it clear that Peter is now a symbol of protected love of which women are unable to let go. This is problematic for Peter because everyone else’s perception of him pulls him back from his strive towards humanity and self actualization, striping him of his fourth dimensionality, and turning him into the two dimensional archetype that they have in their heads. Even worse for Peter, he can’t get out of everyone else’s archetypal idea of him because his own adamant desire to remain a boy and refusal to grow up simply reinforces his symbolic constitution in the minds of others.

Adding another problem to the poor Peter streak, the Darling women, the one’s he seeks out to be his mothers, are the biggest perpetrators of trapping Peter in a cycle. Once Wendy has Jane and lets Jane go with Peter, the narrator outlines how “Jane is now a common grown-up, with a daughter called Margaret…Peter comes for Margaret and takes her to Neverland…When Margaret grows up she will have a daughter, who is to be Peter’s mother in turn; and so it will go on” (159). Peter’s interaction with the Darling women makes it impossible for him to fully become human. As we saw earlier, the longer he spends with Wendy, the more of a real human he becomes, but when she leaves him and grows up she destroys all the growth and progress he has made in his time with her. She, like everyone else, reduces him to a symbol, a vague memory of her first time being in love. When she’s all grown up and Peter comes back to take her, “Something inside her was crying ‘Woman, woman, let go of me’” (155). She had trapped Peter inside her, keeping him at the same place he was when they were children, and when she’s finally able to let him go, he’s been stuck in the same place for so long without the help to move forward that the only thing he knows how to do is reset to the way it was before. And then the whole process is repeated with Jane, then Margaret, then Margaret’s daughter, and the rest of the Darling women that come to follow. The process sticks Peter in a catch 22 because he needs a mother (the Darling women) to achieve his desire of growing into a real self actualizing human, but to do this he needs them to remain a child and stay with him, which they aren’t willing to do, so they leave him and he defaults back to two dimensionality.

Peter desires both to remain a child forever but also to become a real human child instead of remaining a symbol in the minds of others. To accomplish this Peter needs a mother. As long as one is in the care of their mother, they are looked upon as a child. The symbol of adulthood is moving away from the parent’s house and leaving their care to become more self-sufficient and self-actualizing. If Peter always has a mother taking care of him, he will always be viewed as a kid. However, this mother needs to be a child as well. Thinking about it from a logical standpoint, if a child who has an adult mother grows into an adult, then maybe a child who has a child mother grows into a child. From an emotional standpoint, kids can see and interact with Peter, he’s not just a symbol to them, they’re willing to see him in the fourth dimension of which he craves to be a part. Most of all, kids can play by the rules of pretend in a way that adults can’t. The narrator describes, “The difference between him and the other boys at such a time was that they knew it was make-believe, while to him make-believe and true were the exact same thing” (59). Only a child would be able to interact with a child who sees pretend and reality as the same, and only a child would be able to make that child see that they’re not the same at all. Later, Peter, scared, asks Wendy, “It is only make-believe, isn’t it, that I am their father?” (94). His line drawing of the difference between make-believe and reality is another step for him towards becoming a real human child. Only a child could have made him realize that. Peter can only get the help and mothering he needs from a girl, not a woman, but he is the only one who follows the pattern of not growing up, so his mother has to leave him before he’s fully hit the point he needs to hit in order to be real.

The other part of the question that is Peter Pan, is that he needs people around him to define himself. Yes, time doesn’t affect Peter, but Peter is in a perpetual race against time to answer his riddle before someone leaves him again. Peter seldom “had dreams, and they were more painful than the dreams of other boys. For hours he could not be separated from these dreams, though he wailed piteously in them. They had to do, I think, with the riddle of his existence” (115). The narrator only mentions these dreams when Peter has been left alone, and the only time Peter actually has one of these dreams is when he knows for certain that everyone is definitely leaving him. As everyone is returning to London on the pirate ship, Peter “fell asleep by the side of the Long Tom. He had one of his dreams that night, and cried in his sleep for a long time, and Wendy held him tight” (138). Peter has dreams about the riddle of his existence when the people he surrounds himself with leave him. He defines himself by the people he is surrounded by. He knows he’s a child because he knew that he wasn’t Hook, and Hook was a grown-up. He knows that he is a boy because he is with other boys. He knows that he is their leader because they look up to him. But he kills Hook, his boys are going back to the real world, and the one who defined him the most, his mother, is going back with them. She’s taking all of the definitions he’s compiled of him with her and locking them up inside her, rendering them out of his grasp. He only has the time it takes him to bring them back to London for him to figure out who and what he is before having all of the layers he’s built up, stripped away from him. There is a belief that not knowing is the worst feeling in the world. This feeling must be even more intense when the thing you don’t know is what you are. Without the others presence by which to define himself, all he has to go on is the two dimensional archetype that everyone else knows him to be.

This is the most sense I can make out of Peter’s riddle. It’s less of an answer and more of filling out what that riddle is, a bit more clearly. There are so many aspects to the problem that I don’t believe the question is anymore answerable than “what is the meaning of life?” Trying to work through this has made me question the use of people as symbols and whether that is dangerous to the person. The problem with symbols is that they reduce a person to only one thing. Martin Luther King Jr. being used as just a symbol of equality is equally as dehumanizing as using Beyoncé as just a sex symbol. How psychologically damaging is it to know that people only see you as an idea and nothing else?

Barrie, J. M., and Anne McCaffrey. Peter Pan. Modern Library Pbk. ed. New York: Modern Library, 2004. Print.

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