The Gawgon and the Boy

Imagination is the inspiration born through introverted, innovative thought. We can never create something new; you might say our minds are the greenest place on the planet: every thought is recycled. When any author puts pen to paper, every scrap of fiction, every metaphor, comes straight from experience.

Lloyd Alexander's The Gawgon and the Boy, known internationally as The Amazing Adventures of the Invisible Boy, was not intended to stray far from the author's own childhood experiences. It does not. Having read through every memoir published by the author, it is my personal testament that this book comes as a late reflection of Lloyd's early life, with the perspective and experience of an older individual.

There are two characters of whom we get a complete picture. The Boy, David, is a young teenager wrapped in his imagination, living just a few years after the Great War. His childhood mirrors both the author's, and almost every other young American in that decade and in the decades after. The Gawgon, Aunt Annie, is the second character, the woman, distantly related, who becomes The Boy's mentor when illness drives him (happily) away from school.

The novel is told in the first person, from a child's perspective; but the wisdom is seasoned with experience, and the language is that of wry reflection. We follow The Boy's illness which leads him to a relationship with The Gawgon, through the circumstances of the Great Depression, to a family move and first love. It doesn't really matter what anecdotes are recorded; it could have been any number of things and told the same story. A string of thoughts—memories?—connected by adolescent emotional progress forms the body of the book; here we get the full spectrum: joy, loss, love, disappointment, growing up. The Boy is young, disgusted by and enraptured with the female sex, eager for adventure, and distrustful of anything that could be called school. The Gawgon serves as a mentor, but she is fully human. She's been around the block a few times, experienced great joy and greater disappointment, and comes through it with an understanding of life in her position, and The Boy's. A bond is formed.

The Gawgon and The Boy was published just six years before the author's death; any other memoirs by the author come three or four decades prior. Through the journey we come to feel much for both characters; but below the surface, are they not two stages of the same person?