ABSTRACT

Strangely and through David Lurie’s intimate revolt with his ideas, Simon learns to feel for the existential lessons the child offers to him. In the child’s fight for a story he can live with, it is Simon that learns to re-find and live his existence in a ruined world. Benjamin Lytal describes the Jesus-like child as a “spoiled brat.” Urmila Seshagiri characterizes David as the “enfant terrible par excellence”. Fictional characters are similarly hard on the tiny boy. His schoolteacher finds him delayed and “insubordinate”. Even Simon calls him “a baby” and “silly”. Situating the pedagogical relation in the maternal one, Freud claims that intense feelings for one’s primary significant others interfere with the child’s capacity to attach to their teachers at school. The confusion the mother elicits arises transference in each character’s idea and experience of mother.