Essay Questions

At the beginning of Chapter Three, what does Kevin decide he wants to be when he grows up?

Kevin decides he wants to become the King of Nicaragua. This may seem like a strange and completely random and arbitrary sort of fantasy, but it is a sign of Kevin’s rather uniquely focused fantasy life. The idea of becoming a monarch germinates from the act of reading a book about Napoleon. A conventional fantasist would, probably, have marched straight from there to dreams of ruling France. What is fascinating about Kevin’s fantasy life is the route he takes from Napoleon to Nicaragua. It is a route which adds logic to the wish-fulfillment of being a kid. He only chooses the unlike target of Nicaragua as a country to take over through a process of elimination based on the “reality” of actually being able to conquer, having dismissed most of Europe as far too unwieldy. It is a section of the book that provides real insight into Kevin’s personality.

What are the two distinctly different acts which characterize the relationship of Kevin to his parents?

The novel opens with a long and quite detailed—metaphorically rich in imagery—scene of Kevin being bathed by his mother. Although not directly sexual in nature, there is nevertheless a potentially discomforting patina of incestuous suggestion. The same fetishized sexuality also exists in the subtext of the action which defines his relationship with his father. In this case, it is less incestuous than sadomasochistic: Kevin receives a vicious whipping at the business end of a strap. The juxtaposition is striking: the tenderness of the way his mother treats the body of her son with the violence enacted upon by his father. Nevertheless, Kevin’s reaction is what is most notable: he is as accepting—welcoming, even—of the purgative cleansing of strap as he is of the affectionate cleansing of his naked body in the bathtub.

In addition to the bathing and the strapping, what is the one other highly sexualized central event determining the course of the narrative?

While the bathing and the strapping at the hand of his father are certainly sexually suggestive, they are neither one presented as explicitly as sexual in nature. Ironically, perhaps, Kevin’s encounter late in the novel with Nancy is quite explicitly presented as sexual activity even though nothing much really happens. Nancy is the aggressor and Kevin is a reluctant partner whose mind turns to Biblical shame which conflicts with an obvious desire. The three sequences together paint a blistering portrait of the psychological consequences of sexual repression. This repression also quite nicely ties in metaphorically with the fantasy that Kevin puts together of becoming the supreme rule of an essentially insignificant country. This examination of repression essentially serves as the “plot” of the story as the novel comes to conclusion with a spotlight on Kevin as perhaps hopelessly stagnated in terms of natural and positive psycho-sexual development.