Meeting Dibs
The book opens with Dr. Axline seeing the behavioral problems in school which had brought her into the case. These are the images which initiate everything, and if for reason that day or the next Dibs had not behaved in the same way, one wonders if Axline would have agreed she could help him or even that he actually required help.
“If he thought anyone was watching him, he quickly withdrew into his shell. Most of the time he crawled around the edge of the room, lurking under tables, rocking back and forth, chewing on the side of his hand, sucking his thumb, lying prone and rigid on the floor when any of the teachers or children tried to involve him in some activity. He was a lone child in what must have seemed to him to be a cold, unfriendly world.”
The Twilight of Doubt
The entire opening paragraph of Chapter Two begins just after Axline has decided to meet with Dibs’ parents and begin therapy sessions upon their agreement. A single flip of the page, however, and the sureness of that decision seems to be cast into a shadowy cityscape of doubt and uncertainty:
“Out again into the night where the dulled light obscures the decisive lines of reality and casts over the immediate world a kindly vagueness. Now, it is not a matter of all black and white. It is not a matter of `this is it’ because there is no glaring light of unequivocal evidence in which one sees a thing as it is and one knows the answers. The darkened sky gives growing room for softened judgments, for suspended indictments, for emotional hospitality.
Dibs’ Mother
A very effective use of imagery in the service of character description occurs at that first meeting between Axline and Dibs’ mother. This meeting is a veritable explosion of imagery resulting from the evidence that what his mother lacks in terms of a self-censor control of the truth slipping from lips is more than made up in applying authority to every other facet of design. From the room to her face, Dibs’ mother is a portrait of a woman living in what seems to be a still-life portrait:
“Her face was very pale. Her grey hair was parted in the middle and pulled back into a knot at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were light blue. Her lips were thinned into line. Occasionally, she bit her lip nervously. Her dress was steel grey, classically simple. In a cold way, she was a very handsome woman. It would be difficult to guess her age. She looked as though she was well up in her fifties, but she could have been much younger.”
Dibs’ Speaking Style
Dibs takes a while to be pulled out of self-conscious decision to remain mute and incommunicative. Once he opens up, however, he becomes regular little chatterbox. The result is the one of the most singularly idiosyncratic characteristics of his personality is what can only be described as an intensely performative speaking style. When Dibs speaks, it almost always seems as if it is an act and this becomes especially true when actually engaged in the performance aspect of play therapy:
“And here is the duck. The duck has no pond and the duck wants a pond. You watch. Two ducks, there are. Here is the big duck and it is brave. Here is the little duck, but not so brave. The big duck may have a nice safe pond someplace. But this little duck does not have a pond of its own and it does want its own pond. But now these two ducks have met and they are standing here together and they are both watching the truck drive up outside the window."
