Violence, Darkness, and Growing Up Theme Analysis

In “The Child by Tiger,” the young narrator and his friends are fascinated by the Sheppertons’ new hired man, Dick Prosser. They look up to him as someone powerful and skilled, able to split kindling and shoot a rifle with perfect precision. They also trust him because of his gentle, patient instruction, like when he teaches them how to box without hurting each other. And yet they’re often afraid of him, too: sometimes he suddenly comes upon them like a shadow, and they find his deep religiosity “dark and strange.” Despite those moments when Dick seems menacing, the narrator and his friends are too young to understand the uneasy feeling they have about him. They continue to trust him, even when they find his rifle in the basement. When Dick unexpectedly murders six people, however, the boys are changed for good: Nebraska Crane gets swept up in the mob’s savage revenge; the narrator can no longer believe he once thought Dick was gentle and innocent. Through the boys’ changing view of Dick Prosser, the story suggests that part of growing up is coming to recognize the darkness of life—even the potential violence in people—in a way that children cannot.

The story first presents Dick’s power and skill as impressive and wondrous to the young narrator and his friends, leading them to innocently admire and trust him. Dick treats the boys in such a way that they aspire to be like him when they’re older. Dick assures them that one day they’ll be able to hold a football as well as him. The boys love when Dick calls them “Mr. Crane” and “Cap’n Shepperton” because it makes them feel a sense of “mature importance and authority.” On top of this, the boys are ignorant of the potential violence in everything Dick teaches them. While all the things Dick shows them—boxing, shooting, even splitting kindling— could be used for harm in a different context, the boys admire the sheer impressiveness of Dick’s ability to “[put] twelve holes through a space one-inch square” with a gun. It doesn’t occur to them that this skill could just as easily be used to kill a human being. While the boys are ignorant of the violence these skills could be used for, Dick also conceals their potential violence with his gentleness. It is significant that Dick never boxes with the boys and is mindful that they don’t hurt one another. This restraint conceals his violent potential and naturally leads the boys to trust him.

As the story develops, several ambiguous signs point to Dick’s untrustworthiness, but they are too strange for the boys to understand at first. First, the uneasy feeling the boys get around Dick seems unfounded. They think he sneaks up on them like a cat or a shadow, and they imagine it’s him when they hear the house creaking at night. At this point, these superstitions have no grounding in reality, so they seem like the nightmares a typical young boy might have. Furthermore, Dick’s religiosity confuses the boys. Dick gets deeply emotional over his Bible reading, and he chants biblical phrases to them which hint at his desire for social upheaval, but the boys don’t understand his references. Rather than recognizing a darker potential in Dick, they are mostly just mystified by his religious faith, and their trust in him remains intact. Even the sight of the gun in Dick’s basement—a clear hint of violence— is not enough to fully change their view of Dick. Dick asks them to keep the gun a secret from “the other white fokes,” and they eagerly vow secrecy. The boys seem to view this as an instance of Dick trusting them with grown-up information, which makes them feel proud and honored instead of prompting them to suspect anything sinister.

In contrast, after Dick’s crime, the narrator and his friends can no longer see innocence anywhere, even in themselves. First, Dick is transfigured in the narrator’s eyes. When the narrator and Randy see his mangled corpse hanging in the square, they cannot believe that “once this thing had spoken to [them] gently.” They call Dick “a thing” because his corpse no longer resembles a human being, much less the kind person they once trusted. The darkness Dick reveals appears in many other characters as well. Nebraska Crane expresses a newfound potential for violence. He is excited when the mob rallies its forces to hunt down Dick and is triumphant when they succeed in taking down “a big one.” Dick’s crime and its aftermath expose Nebraska to his society’s capacity for violent, racist behavior, and they stir a similar darkness in Nebraska himself. Also, the townspeople appear changed to the narrator when they gather to gape at Dick’s body. Even though they are so familiar to him, his neighbors appear to him now as “the mongrel conquerors of earth,” and the narrator realizes there is something “hateful and unspeakable in the souls of men.” Dick’s crime has brought something to the surface that the narrator never recognized in them before. Even the narrator and Randy, although they are appalled and sickened by the crime, are no longer innocent. They confront their own guilt as if “the burden of the crime was on [their] own shoulders,” because they had known about the gun in the basement and hadn’t told anyone.

Even though the boys’ view of Dick changes and he ceases to be innocent in their eyes, they continue to see in him something they will inevitably become. When they are young at the beginning of the story, they look forward to when they’ll be able to hold a football as well as him, and they are immeasurably proud when he draws them into his confidence. After the crime, they think of their own partial responsibility for it, and they recognize their own potential darkness as well as his. Thus their own innocence goes away along with their ability to recognize innocence in others.