Before she goes to bed, Miss Sidley switches on another light; trying to use light to banish the constricting darkness.
Imagery is very much a large part of the narrative features used in ‘Suffer the little Children.’ Robert’s eyes are described as being like ‘the mud at the bottom of a slow running stream’ suggesting a danger of drowning, that there could be hidden danger in the depths. The children seem to have been underestimated by the narrator. The look that Robert gave her wouldn’t leave her mind, stuck there like ‘a tiny string of roast beef between two molars.’ Aggravating and annoying her even though it was a small thing. She could feel the weight of the children’s eyes like ‘blind, crawling ants’. This builds atmosphere and tension, she waits to lash out but none of the class are stepping out of line; it is almost as if they know how she feels, and are responding accordingly. The story also highlights an important distinction between the children of now, and the children in Miss Sidley’s childhood. ‘A smiling quietness around adults that had never been there before.’ ‘Hiding behind masks’ The sinister aspect of such young children having adult or even alien like descriptions is quite frankly, intimidating – we do not even know what other traits they could posses. ‘Smiling quietness’ also suggests knowledge that they should not have. Another extreme reaction to giggling is encountered in the bathroom. ‘She would shake them…thump their heads against the walls…make them admit they knew’ Her hyper violent response is almost sickening, and then it could almost be justified with the shadows ‘change...to strange hunched shapes’ no longer just children, they have changed to become ‘sexless and soulless, and quite, quite evil.’ Was this a reaction to her thoughts, or is Miss Sidley just going mad? The reader is left to choose.
Robert’s smile becomes ‘vulpine’ - wolf-like, cunning and predatory when Miss Sidley keeps him after school. She tries to reinstate her authority over him, but the efforts do not work ‘instead his smile grew wider.’ He talks back to her, as no normal child would do: ‘It will be just like show and tell, won’t it?’ and then it seems as if the story has moved from just Miss Sidley’s apparent insanity, to something quite disturbing. ‘Robert – the other Robert…still hiding way down in my head.’ Now we see that some alien thing has ‘usurped’ him as he begins to ‘change.’ This simple word now inspires terror in the reader as we have heard it related to something ghostly and ‘phantomish’ when Robert first began to change. He begins to chuckle, which would normally be cute and childlike, but now the ‘slow, cavernous’ sound entrenches a feeling of horror upon the reader.
As Miss Sidley screams and runs out, pupils look at her with ‘uncomprehending’ eyes, suggesting that the entire episode could have still been a figment of her now wild imagination.
Another short sentence is used to describe an important event, “brought the gun to school in her handbag,” now suggests that it has gone much further than the reader would have expected, would she murder them just because she thought they were aliens? She ‘smiles pleasantly’ at her class, secure again, now she has a tangible weapon to fight against their un-naturalness. King almost gives the game away with ‘she did not wish to be a murderer’ which tells us that she is in fact planning to kill the children.
Tension is developed as she takes Robert towards the mimeograph room, there is a planned attack as the room has already been soundproofed. As soon as he begins to change, she shoots him ‘Once. In the head.’ Now only a ‘dead little boy…It was human,’ there is a sudden realisation and her thoughts are written out in italics as her desperate struggle between real life and insanity. She begins to lead them down one by one, ironically like Jesus as a shepherd leading lambs to the slaughter.
Repetition of the first sentence is possibly a hint of what is about to happen. “Buddy Jenkins was his name, psychiatry was his game.” The reader immediately has a sense that something else could go wrong. Miss Sidley is introduced to the ‘smiling, drooling, cataclysmically retarded children’ and responds to them well at first, but then she seems to see something which ‘disturbs her.’ She is taken away and later that night kills herself with a bit of broken mirror glass – imagery included again of the separate reality on the other side of the mirror. After this, Buddy Jenkins begins to watch the children more and more ‘in the end, he was hardly able to take his eyes off them.’ The same thing seems to be happening again, the reader is now lead down the same path: to decide for themselves whether the story was real, or not.
I enjoyed ‘Suffer the Little Children’ as the description and part psychological aspect of the text engage the reader more into wondering what the children could actually be, and although there are constant references as to their alien features, we do not know until the end if it is all imaginary or real. The story uses extensive description and imagery to aid the feelings of tension and fear between the main characters, an intense, horrifying atmosphere is created in the descriptions of Robert changing in ‘Suffer the Little Children.’