An Awfully Big Adventure: Killing Death in War Stories for Children

The increase of discourses dealing with death, violence or brutality in times of war, may be due to two factors. First there is a perception of a global increase of fields of war. This, in turn, may be dependent upon the second factor: the ready availability of images and information about war, from newspapers, histories of war events, and cinematic documentaries, to video games and, as I explore in this paper, fictional texts for children. In war stories for children death is usually at one remove because children do not normally fight as soldiers. For the child in war time, their position is usually that of the equivocal observer. This then reveals a basic problem of how to tell of the brutality of war, how to underline an apparent fundamental ideology of war stories for children; that is, to create a sense of anti-war ethos, when the child narrator and focaliser is not a combatant. Nevertheless it seems that war stories should, and do, attempt to show that war is about 'killing soldiers' and often others as well. But in so doing it is rarely this simple. There may be many reasons why this blunt and necessary aspect of war is re-shaped for the child reader; but in this paper I want to concentrate on the ways and means of this re-shaping.