Children and Innocence

One of the most central claims made by the novel is that the desire to love and care for children is universal, and any being that acts contrary to this desire is evil. The death of village children as a result of ecological degradation is the novel’s primary inciting incident, and the fact that these deaths are caused by Pexton puts them in violation of the rule that all beings, by nature, care for their children. This paints Pexton as the villain. While the representatives of Pexton may care deeply about their own children, they are incapable of extending this care empathically to the children of Kosawa, this lack of empathy is the primary expression of their evil. “We were children, like their children,” the collective narrator states, “and we wanted them to recognize that” (5). By titling six of its eleven chapters “The...