Child is a White Cloth (?): Relationships between Children Characters and Social Issues Represented in S.E.A. Write’s Short Stories

Abstract

This article aims to study relationships between children characters and social issues represented in short stories wining the S.E.A. Write Award. From the analysis of seven  selected stories in two decades ranging from 1997 to 2017 (B.E. 2540-2560), the results show that children characters in these works alienated from social norms in terms of physical body, special needs, gender, ethnicity, way of thought, and belief. This important kind of characters revealed emotions and difficulties that children faced with family, society, and state, suggesting the issues of social status, competitiveness, government commanding, and ethnic conflicts. Therefore, children characters were used as literary techniques for criticising these issues which were not related to adolescent matters, but they are, in fact, the so-called ‘adult matter.’ Mainstream discourse in Thai society, namely the notion of ‘child is a white cloth’ meaning child is an innocent person, was significantly referred to when questioning these issues. Even characters in each story were not innocent, yet they were represented as complicated and varied characters.