Vaginal apparition holds in its claws a 'big silvery fish.' David thinks to himself, 'I didn't know owls could catch fish.' These feathers, outdoors, become the face of a mother owl, 'with its big roundīrown eyes: each of them has a feathery white ring around it, and then a brown one, and then a white one, and then a brown one, till the rings come together and make big brown and white rings around its whole head.' This concentric His father is panting.' His mother's dreams, like her head, are eclipsed by feathers.

David invades their dreams, and sees himself in process of replacing his father: 'his father, looking very small, is running back andįorth with David on his back, only David is as big as ever. Mother, as she was for Oedipus, is unrecognizable. However, has placed her head beneath a pillow. His father is a substantial lump in the bed, with his head out his mother, Illusions of changing direction and inert voyage, prepare the onanistic mystery launched, the child glides with criminal stealth into his parents' room. The sensations of the blankets' weight, the Of scale with the other figures (mice, sheep, an owl's frown) in the finely hatched pen-and-ink drawings.įlying of course is a euphemism in more than one language for sexual activity, and a man can recall those disorienting intimations of potency that visited him in bed at about the age David seems to be. But David's dreaming subconscious, and not his sleeping body, is presumably represented, which accounts also for the visually disturbing manner in which the boy's figure is out On, sometimes with underpants under the pajamas. Most little boys that I have lived with have been rather severe and shy about nakedness and slept with pajamas Looms specific in Sendak's illustrations, one of which shows a prepubescent penis and another a rather inviting derriere.

The nudity is unspecified in the text but

The hero of 'Fly by Night' is a boy named David, who lives alone, with none save animals for friends, and who at night evidently lifts up out of his bed and skims through the moonlit air in the nude. Intense and loving and uneasy-making, in tune with the prose they illumine. Than its 30 spacy pages would seem to require the final and slimmest entry in the Jarrell juvenile canon arrives, entitled 'Fly by Night.' It is illustrated, as were the previous two, by Maurice Sendak the illustrations are Translations from the German of the Brothers Grimm were followed by 'The Gingerbread Rabbit' and 'The Bat-Poet' in 1964 and the Newbery-Honor-winning 'The Animal Family' in 1965. N the few years before his sudden death in 1965, the poet and critic Randall Jarrell devoted surprisingly much of his energy to the creation of children's books. NovemRandall Jarrell Writing Stories for Children By JOHN UPDIKE Randall Jarrell Writing Stories for Children

The Bat-Poet by Randall Jarrell