Making Sense Out of Senselessness: The Social Construction of Adolescent Reality in the War Novels of Robert Westall

The late Robert Westall returned again and again to several themes and motifs in his novels for young people: cats, antiques, and motorcycles, to name three. Perhaps his greatest contribution to children's literature, however, is his depiction of war and its impact on young protagonists. In this essay, I would like to focus on the three war novels by Robert Westall that have generated the most critical acclaim: The Machine Gunners (winner of the 1976 Carnegie medal and runner-up for the Boston Globe/Horn Book award), Kingdom by the Sea (winner of the Guardian award and runner-up for the 1991 Carnegie medal), and Gulf (runner-up for the 1993 Carnegie medal). My thesis is that in each of these novels, the young hero's sense of himself and his place in the world is socially constructed, a product of the boy's relationships with other people who are culturally situated in a world at war. I will look at the ways in which the adolescent protagonists in the novels try on roles, acquire social knowledge, and construct a reality that enables them to make sense out of the apparently senseless events that war has introduced into their lives.

The Social Construction of Reality

The idea that reality is socially constructed is a concept from phenomenological social science. In The Social Construction of Reality, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann describe the reality of everyday life as an intersubjective world, shared with others and characterized by a web of human relationships, arranged in patterns that impose themselves on our understanding of the world. According to this world view, the process by which we come to understand and be a part of the reality of everyday life is socialization. While socialization is a lifelong process, childhood is a particularly salient period for acquiring the understanding of what it means to be a member of a particular society. As Berger and Luckmann make clear, that understanding is not the result of independent reasoning by isolated individuals, but rather the consequence of the child's "taking over" the world in which others already live. Children try on roles and see how other people react to them, modifying their own behavior accordingly. They learn how knowledge is distributed in their society and acquire the knowledge that is available to them. Over time, they come to acquire personal definitions and understandings of social phenomena that are shared with other members of their society and culture. This web of shared meanings within a society is, as philosopher John R. Searle points out, "weightless and invisible," taken for granted by its members (4). It is the shared meanings that hold society together.

Wartime places particular stresses on societies. New shared meanings must be generated to account for the new conditions and norms. Governments are more likely to control the dissemination of information, and new values may be encouraged or even legislated. Novels written for children about wartime present interesting case studies in the social construction of reality in a time of societal stress, when new sets of shared meanings are being formed. Joel Taxel has examined the heavy ideological weight that is carried by children's novels about the American Revolution. He finds that they tend to mirror the values and shared meanings about such issues as war, patriotism, and governmental authority that prevail during the time in which they were written. Thus, he finds antiwar sentiment in books about the Revolution that were written during the Vietnam era, while books written during and just after World War II see the Revolution as a "just war" (28).

The Machine Gunners

Robert Westall's first novel, The Machine Gunners, was written to explain to the author's son what it was like to be an English boy during World War II...