Scout Finch
Jack Sawyer
Harriet Dufresnes
Huck Finn
Holden Caulfield
Ender Wiggin
The one thing that these characters - from To Kill a Mocking Bird, The Talisman, The Little Friend, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn*,The Catcher in the Rye, and Ender’s Game - have in common is that they are each the main character of a story written for adults, and all are children.
Care to recommend some more child progtagonists in adult fiction? (let’s say they need to be a child for at least 51% of the book to count) Maybe ones you think are great but overlooked? No YA books, please.
*let’s not have a lit class level argument about To Kill a Mocking Bird. We see things through Scout’s eyes, so even if it’s a story “about” her father, she’s the main character for all intents and purposes.
I seem to recall that the concept of children’s literature is relatively recent, and that most of the classics that we treat as children’s literature today were seen as regular mainstream fiction back then, but they have been reclassified because they have child protagonists.
There are quite a few main characters in Dickens (and other Victorian novels) that start out as children, but Oliver Twist is probably the best example of one who’s a child all the way through the story.
Oskar Schell is the nine-year-old protagonist of Jonathan Safran Foer’s wonderful novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which deals with Oskar’s father’s death in the World Trade Center on 9-11. Very much an adult book.