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Illustrated portrait of The unnamed narrator

A character in A Boy's Own Story

The unnamed narrator

A gifted but unreliable self-interpreter looking back on the shame, longing, and betrayals of his adolescence.

What they want in White’s narrator’s account

To be loved by men while retaining the approval and conventional future he believes society requires.

The book

Cover of A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White
A Boy's Own StoryEdmund White, 1982

A boy learns shame early and tries every available way to turn himself into someone else.

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Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

The middle-aged narrator looks back at his adolescence in the American Midwest during the 1940s and 1950s. He wants intimacy with men while trying to escape the social identity attached to that desire.

His intelligence allows him to see much of his own vanity, fear, opportunism, and cruelty. It does not prevent him from rationalizing actions that hurt other people.

How the book draws them

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

  • Bookish and self-consciousHe understands himself through books, art, and elaborate private explanations.
  • Hungry for male approvalAdmiration of fathers, friends, teachers, and older men repeatedly becomes desire.
  • A retrospective voiceThe adult narrator gives adolescent scenes an irony the boy himself could not possess.
  • Skilled at rationalizationHe invents explanations that let him seek men while denying what those encounters mean.
  • Vain as well as vulnerableHis sensitivity does not keep him from using or judging other people.
  • Capable of betrayalHis fear of identification culminates in reporting Mr. Beattie.
Where his self-denial leadsHow the book leaves them, what happened after, and what the record says. Open when you're ready.

After initiating a sexual encounter with Mr. Beattie, the narrator reports him to the school. The betrayal protects his fantasy of separateness but becomes the moral failure the adult narrator cannot excuse.

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