SOURCE: "Initation and Counter-Initiation: Progress Toward Adulthood in the Stories of Michel Tournier," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 28, No. 2, Spring, 1991, pp. 151-68.

In the following essay, Easterlin discusses and praises Tournier's technique of initiating the protagonists of his children's stories—and his young readers—into adulthood.

In "Michel Tournier's Texts for Children," an article that appeared a few years ago in Children's Literature [No. 13, 1985], Joseph McMahon analyzes some of the differences between Tournier's approach to child and adult audiences. Basing his statements both on Tournier's own remarks about audience and on readings of the fictions, McMahon says:

What Tournier seems to espy is a complex situation: children, up to a certain time, bring to their reading a limited amount of experience and many look upon reading as a way of understanding and adding to that experience. What adults bring to reading is an indefinable attitude which in...