5. The Story of the Bad Little Boy (1865)/The Story of the Good Little Boy (1870)

Summary: These two short stories follow the lives of two little boys, one bad who is the opposite of every boy in the Sunday-school books and another one who strives to be just like them and lead a virtuous life. One of them ends up a successful and well-respected man, and the other one ends up in pieces. Literally in pieces.

Commentary: I felt like I had to do these two together, instead of individually because they are definitely companion stories. In the Bad Little Boy, the narrator feigns mild bewilderment at the behavior of this boy, but one particular part came across to me as the entire point of the story: "He struck his little sister on the temple with his fist when he was angry, and she didn't linger in pain ... and die with sweet words of forgiveness ... that redoubled the anguish of his breaking heart. No; she got over it." I like the semi-colon in the second sentence a lot. But maybe it's just because I think semi-colons are pretty or something. The Good Little Boy also has a tone of pseudo-astonishment mingled with slight pity for this boy, especially since he always had to go up to the bad little boys and recite his Sunday-school lessons to them like a tired old man. The narrator keeps repeating that even though the good little boy tried really hard to do the very things listed in his Sunday-school books, they never seemed to work out well for him at all. So much so, that one day, when he tried to stop the bad little boys from doing their bad things, he got tangled up in an empty-nitroglycerin-can prank and flew off with a trail of "fifteen dogs stringing after him like the tail of a kite."