SOURCE: “‘Yung and Easily Freudened’:¹ William Gass's ‘The Pedersen Kid,’” in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 11, No. 3, Fall, 1991, pp. 88-101.

In the following essay, Dettmar provides analysis of initiation themes, postmodern literary techniques, and psychoanalytic associations in Gass's story“The Pedersen Kid.” Dettmar concludes, “Jorge is not just another ‘little Oedipus’—rather he's a little Freud, both author and subject of his own case history.”

Hans: “What I've told you isn't the least true.”

Father: “How much of it's true?”

“None of it's true; I only told you for fun. …”²

William Gass's first story, “The Pedersen Kid,” is a weird and unsettling piece; but in spite of the menacing atmosphere it evokes, its stylistic daring has to date not been sufficiently appreciated by critics. Larry McCaffery, for instance, contrasts “the early, somewhat realistic methods of ‘The Pedersen Kid’” to the “highly experimental, plotless arrangements of ‘In the Heart...