Subsequently,  I  am  answering  the  question  why  an  author  would  choose  a  child  as  the  narrator  of  his  story,  rather  than  an  adult.  Which  literary  message  can  a  child  transmit  that  an  adult  fails to impart?  And  finally,  which  influence  does  the  author  and  the  reader’s  background  and  prior  experience  have  on  the  reading process? In order to answer the foregoing questions, I have discussed two
novels in particular: The Life Before Us, by the French writer Romain Gary and Extremely Loud and Incredibly
Close, by the young American author Jonathan Safran Foer. Furthermore, my thesis incorporates secondary
literature and analyses other critics’ points of view in relation to child narrators, in order to assure an extended outlook on the discussion at hand. Finally, my research paper ends with the debate whether there is such a
literary device as a stereotypical child narrator or whether all child narrators differ according to the author
who created them and according to their literary function? Can a child narrator keep all the characteristics of
an average child or does the young narrator need to lose part of his childlike mannerism in order to render the
story meaningful for an adult reader? In the end, I would like to highlight that it was a challenge to find secondary material in relation to my research topic, because the analysis of the child narrator has only recently become the focus of literary criticism. Moreover, I would like to point out that the present thesis just makes sense if we see and treat the literary child figure like a real person. Otherwise, the discussion would remain limited to a purely hypothetical level.