“He will be a Pet Forever”: Rewriting a Boy-and-Dog Story as an Anti-Bildungsroman in John Donovan’s I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip.
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John Donovan’s I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip (1969) is widely recognized as the first young adult novel in the U.S. to address homosexuality. Despite its groundbreaking nature, the novel has been criticized for its ambiguous and unresolved ending, particularly its portrayal of Davy’s queer identity and the cliché that homosexuality becomes punished with the traumatic loss of his beloved dog, Fred. This paper examines how Davy’s coming-of-age narrative reimagines the boy-and-his-dog story as an anti-Bildungsroman by analyzing his identification with Fred through the lens of Erik Erikson’s psychosocial development, particularly the idea of “Identity crisis vs. Role Confusion” at adolescence. While Erikson’s theory assumes a linear progression toward a stable identity, I reinterpret his framework within the context of queer YA literature, exploring how queer adolescents navigate identity formation outside heteronormative timelines. Fred’s death does not signify Davy’s progression toward adulthood but reinforces his desire to stall and delay. In this sense, the novel defies the generic conventions of boy-and-his-dog stories, in which the dog is often sacrificed to reorient the child into normative heterosexuality. Davy’s lingering in a queer moratorium—most evident through his identification with Fred—can be explained by Kathryn Stockton’s concept of “growing sideways,” where a queer child explores non-normative aspects of identity, using an animal interval as a lateral relation. Ultimately, this paper offers a new perspective on Davy’s relationship with Fred, interpreting it as a form of growing sideways that challenges the clear-cut resolutions typically expected in traditional coming-of-age stories.
Abstract
John Donovan’s I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip (1969) is widely recognized as the first young adult novel in the U.S. to address homosexuality. Despite its groundbreaking nature, the novel has been criticized for its ambiguous and unresolved ending, particularly its portrayal of Davy’s queer identity and the cliché that homosexuality becomes punished with the traumatic loss of his beloved dog, Fred. This paper examines how Davy’s coming-of-age narrative reimagines the boy-and-his-dog story as an anti-Bildungsroman by analyzing his identification with Fred through the lens of Erik Erikson’s psychosocial development, particularly the idea of “Identity crisis vs. Role Confusion” at adolescence. While Erikson’s theory assumes a linear progression toward a stable identity, I reinterpret his framework within the context of queer YA literature, exploring how queer adolescents navigate identity formation outside heteronormative timelines. Fred’s death does not signify Davy’s progression toward adulthood but reinforces his desire to stall and delay. In this sense, the novel defies the generic conventions of boy-and-his-dog stories, in which the dog is often sacrificed to reorient the child into normative heterosexuality. Davy’s lingering in a queer moratorium—most evident through his identification with Fred—can be explained by Kathryn Stockton’s concept of “growing sideways,” where a queer child explores non-normative aspects of identity, using an animal interval as a lateral relation. Ultimately, this paper offers a new perspective on Davy’s relationship with Fred, interpreting it as a form of growing sideways that challenges the clear-cut resolutions typically expected in traditional coming-of-age stories.
참고문헌 (18)
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