Boy at the Window

The boy has plenty of time to learn that a snowman cannot feel. The anxieties of the boy reflect his tender young age. His concern over how the snowman will survive a cold winter night reflects a caring heart still untested by real-time anxieties, a heart that has not been taught its limits. His world, suggested by the warm and inviting room all around him, suggests his sheltered childhood, how he has been protected from the fears and pain that will invariably come. Despite his young age, however, his worry over the snowman is authentic and as real as a child can feel. Too young to understand irony, too innocent to see how relative suffering can be (a snowman, for instance, cannot suffer in the way a person can) are marks not of ignorance but of innocence.

That he conceives of his home as Paradise, as a heaven denied his snowman, again reflects not his ignorance but the sweet naivete of a child and his own presumably religious upbringing. He will have plenty of time to see the problems in his home, problems Wilbur knows as overarching author-ity, are surely there. No home is as perfect as a child assumes it to be.