Madsen Hardy has a doctorate in English and is a freelance writer and editor. In this essay she discusses the role of love and family in Ellison's short story, and his allegory about the power of fantasy.

"Jeffty has become an image of reverence for the parts of my childhood that were joyous and free of pain," Harlan Ellison writes in the introduction to his story "Jeffty Is Five" as it appears in the 1980 collection Shatterday. The author's comment is hard to reconcile with the events of the story's plot, in which a perpetual five-year-old lets an adult friend into his world of timeless wonder, only to be betrayed, beaten by strangers, and left to die if not outright killed by his own mother. Jeffty's parents don't love him and he is shunned by other children his own age because of his strange affliction—he never...