SOURCE: "Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island: The Ideal Fable," in Touchstones: Reflections on the Best in Children's Literature, ChLA Publishers, 1985, pp. 242-52.

[In the following essay, Gannon examines the way Treasure Island effectively addresses young readers, emphasizing the theme of the romantic quest, the use of retrospective narration, and the presence of mystery.]

Treasure Island has the direct appeal of a sailor's yarn yet offers young readers the psychological satisfactions of a quest romance. While it has some of the thematic complexity that marks an interesting adult novel, the whole spell-binding story is told with careful attention to the needs, the habits of mind, and the special sensitivities of Stevenson's chosen audience: youngsters. Perhaps Henry James said it best: "Treasure Island is a 'boy's book,' in the sense that it embodies a boy's vision of the extraordinary; but it is unique in . . . that what we see in it is not only the ideal fable, but as part and parcel of that, as it were, the young reader himself and his state of mind: we seem to read it over his shoulder, with an arm around his neck. It is all as perfect as a well-played boy's game, and nothing can exceed the spirit and skill, the humour and the open-air feeling, with which the whole thing is kept at the critical pitch" (James and Stevenson 154).

If we look beneath the theatrical trappings—the pieces of eight, the Jolly Roger, the flashing cutlasses—at the heart of Stevenson's "ideal fable" is every child's favorite story of the young adventurer who leaves home on a romantic quest for treasure, a journey full of difficulties and dangers. Like many another adolescent in literature, Jim Hawkins discovers his quest to be a psychological journey also, its most precious reward being a modest degree of self-knowledge. In traditional literature, the treasure found by the quest hero is often interpreted as symbolizing the fullness of life—wisdom, wholeness, maturity. Since the pirate treasure in Stevenson's tale is, after all, blood money, it is not surprising to find that his story conveys in symbolic terms—which even young readers can grasp—the human cost of growing up in a world where it can be very hard to tell the respectable citizens from the pirates.

But all of this makes Treasure Island sound more like some gloomy Hawthorne fable than like the splendid entertainment it is. The moment the nut brown old sailor with the tarry pigtail and the sabre scar arrives at the Admiral Ben Bow Inn, the magic of Stevenson's story takes hold, and the book becomes almost impossible to put down. The whole tale is spun out so smoothly and engagingly that it is easy to underestimate the skill with which Stevenson has adapted his storytelling technique to the specific needs of a young audience.

The choice of a retrospective narrator whose own younger self can serve as the main focalizing agent in the story is an especially shrewd stroke. The sympathies and interests of young readers are readily engaged by the young Jim Hawkins, whose perspective on events will seem very familiar. Yet the narrator, an older Jim, can plausibly supply the kind of assistance inexperienced readers need. He can establish possibilities, clarify the significance of events, illuminate motivation, define terms, hint at what is to come, and comment on what has already been told. It is largely by means of this narrator that Stevenson can, as James put it, describe "credulity with all the resources of experience" and represent "a crude stage with infinite ripeness" (James and Stevenson 131).

The manner in which Stevenson invites young readers to enter into the game of looking over Jim Hawkins's shoulder to take the measure of his experience is worth a closer look. He presents the entire story as a document written by an older, more experienced Jim Hawkins, some time after his voyage. Adult or experienced readers can come to know this narrator well enough to read some of his fallibilities back into his account of his youthful adventures. Younger readers may miss some of the nuances of this characterization, but even they will soon recognize that the young man telling the story is very different from the boy whose story is told. They may sense a certain priggishness or lack of enthusiasm for adventure in the storyteller, whose reluctance altogether to identify himself with the "born favorite" whose story he tells is pretty clear.

The younger Jim's recorded observations are often perceptive enough to make clear—even to younger readers—what is going on. When, in the first chapter, the rum-soaked old sea-farer, Billy Bones, appears at the Admiral Ben Bow Inn, Jim—and the young reader—easily see through Billy's transparent cover story. Jim is even shrewd enough to notice that the locals who shiver at Billy's dreadful stories about murder on the high seas rather enjoy the experience of being scared out of their wits.

Because Jim is presented as a sensitive boy, as well as an observant one, his dreams sometimes express an emotional understanding of situations he might not be able to analyze rationally. Jim's early nightmares about being pursued by a one-legged sailor carefully prepare the inexperienced reader for what is to come and add an interesting tension to the first scenes in which Long John Silver appears. On the other hand, young Jim's innocent reveries early in the story, his "sea dreams" of adventures to come, need to be put in perspective, and the older Jim can comment in his rueful way, "in all my fancies nothing occurred to me so strange and tragic as our actual adventures."

Sometimes the boy's emotional reactions to a person or an event will be complex and confused. At such times, Stevenson has a way of centering on some small external incident which will carry the emotional charge he wishes to convey to the young reader. Jim's wrenching discovery of what leaving home really means to him is brought out in terms any child can understand, as the narrator describes his boyish reaction to the nameless stranger who takes his place at the Admiral Ben Bow: "It was on seeing that boy that I understood for the first time, my situation. I had thought up to the moment of the adventures before me, not at all of the home I was leaving, and now at sight of this clumsy stranger, who was to stay here in my place beside my mother, I had my first attack of tears."

Stevenson explains the strangely mixed feelings young Jim has toward Billy Bones by listing some of the things that puzzled Jim about him. Billy's musical repertoire includes both rough sailor's songs and tender love ballads. The young reader is given some chilling entries from Billy's journal, detailing murder and treachery, but also is told that the "five or six curious West Indian shells" in the old pirate's sea chest set Jim to wondering about the sort of man who would carry such shells "with him in his wandering, guilty, haunted life." The descriptions of Billy's raucous carousings are quite vivid, and it is fairly clear that the strain of dealing with the obstreperous old pirate may have shortened the life of Jim's father. Yet when Billy, whose presence at the Inn Jim has betrayed to the other pirates, drops dead of an apoplexy after receiving the Black Spot, Jim is startled by the force of his own reaction to the event. The narrator explains it this way for the young reader: "It is a curious thing to understand, for I had certainly never liked the man, though of late I had begun to pity him, but as soon as I saw that he was dead, I burst into a flood of tears. It was the second death I had known, and the sorrow of the first was still fresh in my heart."

Part of the fun of reading Treasure Island comes from the way Stevenson manages his narrative so that young readers can become actively engaged in the game of solving mysteries along with the young Jim. There are a number of riddles to be solved: the meaning of the enigmatic jottings in Billy's book, the real import of the all-too-revealing letter from Squire Trelawney outlining his acquisition of ship and crew, the mysterious hints from Ben Gunn that all is not as it seems, the treasure map itself, with its instructions. In order to help the young reader play detective, Stevenson's narrator carefully refrains from telling too much, too soon.

David Daiches has commented on the brilliance with which Stevenson even manages to put the young reader "into the possession of significant information which is withheld from the chief characters—namely the knowledge of the real nature of the crew and of Long John Silver's true intentions". He does this by allowing two ingenuous characters—young Jim and the Squire—to be completely fooled by the wily Silver. But the young reader, helped by broad hints and admissions from the narrator that "Silver was too deep and too ready and too clever for me," will readily see what has happened.

Much of Treasure Island is in brilliantly handled dramatic dialogue, salty enough to convey the tang of piratical talk yet chaste enough to pass muster with the most respectable of parents. Frequently, Stevenson must find a way to clarify some point which has arisen in dialogue, beyond any possibility of misunderstanding. He often achieves this by means of a brief interjection from the narrator; sometimes he uses one of the more intelligent and reliable of the adult characters instead. For example, after Captain Smollett has heard the treasure hunters' plans, and has taken the measure of his crew, he suggests some precautions to the Squire and the Doctor concerning the bestowal of men and supplies. For the benefit of any young reader who has failed to catch the Captain's drift, Stevenson has the Doctor cut in: "In other words, you expect a mutiny."

An examination of the famous apple-barrel scene demonstrates something of Stevenson's care in conveying to inexperienced readers the full impact of an oblique adult conversation. To begin with, Stevenson cues the reader to the importance of what is going to be related; Jim says, "But good did come of the apple barrel as you shall hear, for if it had not been for all that we should have had no note of warning and might all have perished by the hand of treachery." And he points out that before he'd heard a dozen words, he had "understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended" upon him alone. Alerted, the reader attends to the lively dialogue in which Silver plays up to a young sailor, even as he had flattered Jim earlier on the voyage. Lest the reader should miss the delicious irony of this, Jim adds "You can imagine how I felt when I heard this abominable rogue addressing another in the very same words of flattery as he had used to myself." Throughout the scene, Stevenson shows a most attentive care for readers, defining terms, summarizing, and interpreting ambiguous remarks. And by the end of it, young readers will have a pretty clear picture of the strategies and aims of the villains. Since the action will take some swift twists and turns once the island is actually reached, this sort of preparation will be extremely useful.

Stevenson's skill at storytelling for young people is really tested in the Treasure Island sequences in the book, for children can find it difficult to follow two or more developing lines of action at the same time. The interweaving of the activities of the various parties on the island is brilliantly handled. Like a skilled film director, Stevenson provides "establishing shots" to orient the reader to the landscape whenever necessary, and frequently places the action with reference to the map he has made so central to the plot. Stevenson describes the varied terrain of the island—dazzling beaches, fetid swamps, piney woods—precisely and economically, aware that nothing can put a young reader to sleep so quickly as an over-extended descriptive passage, however "finely" written.

Stevenson was very much aware of the need to supplement children's experience of human nature. He observed once that the child "does not yet know enough of the world and of men. His experience is incomplete. That stage-wardrobe and scene-room that we call the memory is so ill-provided, that he can body out few stories, to his own content, without some external aid" Virginibus Puerisque 142).

For Stevenson, the art of characterizing the personages of romance was an art of illusion. Characterization was to be achieved by the use of vivid, suggestive details. But of course, a child audience might sometimes need a little extra help, and Stevenson had a number of artful ways of supplying it. For minor characters there is direct definition. We are told flatly of one of the sailors that he is a "hero." And when Dr. Livesey assures Jim that Captain Smollett is a better man than he, a young reader will do well to believe it. After Jim has met the decidedly odd Ben Gunn, Stevenson lets the Doctor give a medical and psychological analysis of Gunn, suggesting that if there can be any doubt in Jim's mind as to whether the man he's met is mad or sane, he's probably sane: "A man who has been three years biting his nails on a desert island, Jim, can't expect to appear as sane as you or me. It doesn't lie in human nature."

Jim only learns to interpret the behavior of his elders gradually; as each habitually acts according to his inner nature, Jim (and readers) come to recognize familiar cycles of action and response in their behavior.

Squire Trelawney jumps to conclusions, fails to see difficulties, blusters and boasts, but can be "silent and cool" in a tight spot, and is a dead shot. Doctor Livesey is a confident, forthright man, ready to face down Billy Bones and to deal with Silver, but willing to tend his enemies when they are sick, even if it's only to save them for the gallows. Only Long John Silver really remains something of an enigma, and that because of the imagination, energy, and cunning that give him many faces, many voices.

Stevenson is famous for his trick of letting the external appearance of a character reveal his nature. Thus Jim describes the welcome sight of the sprightly Dr. Livesey at the Admiral Ben Bow: "I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright doctor, with his powder white as snow, and his bright black eyes and pleasant manners made with the coltish country folk, and above all, with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting far gone in rum, with his arms on the table." Stevenson's use of physical deformity to signal moral limitation in his characters may give some modern readers pause, but it is clear from the first that the infirmities of the pirates—from Billy Bones's scar and his alcoholism to the wounds of Pew and Silver—are meant to be souvenirs of their desperate adventures on the high seas, and so to be the natural outward manifestations of their inward natures. That each is pitiably marked and hurt, yet also terrifying, conveys marvelously the special perspective on evil this story offers. What you do, here, materially affects what you become. And evil, though appallingly costly to the evildoer, can also bring a momentary advantage: the power of utter ruthlessness. Silver's swift hurling of his crutch as a weapon graphically demonstrates the error of the brave man who turns his back on the rascal. And Blind Pew's voice alone is enough to compel Jim's obedience: "I never heard a voice so cruel and cold and ugly as that blind man's. It cowed me more than the pain . . ."

The narrative perspective announced on the first page of Treasure Island assures child readers that the protagonist and his two best friends will survive all the perils to be related. And though the story includes a great deal of violent action, it is handled with surprising tact. Violent deeds are often mentioned, but not always described in any detail. Billy Bones tells dreadful stories, but we never hear them. Silver may threaten to strangle the Squire and Pew to put Jim's eyes out, but these remain empty words.

In fact, Jim seems to lead a charmed life. When the pirates attack the Admiral Ben Bow it is only after Jim and his mother have slipped out. When Jim witnesses violent acts, it is usually from a safe distance. He is hidden in some bushes when Pew is trampled down, as he is again, on the island, when he witnesses Silver's murder of a faithful hand. When the attack on the stockade would seem to confront Jim with a situation in which he must kill or be killed, he very conveniently trips and rolls down a soft sandbank to safety, and when he regains his footing, "in this breath of time, the fight was over."

Jim's shooting of Israel Hands is similarly managed by Stevenson so as to minimize the boy's responsibility. Pursued by the murderous Hands, Jim climbs the mast of the Hispaniola. Hands pretends to offer him a deal, but suddenly throws a dagger which pins Jim's shoulder to the mast. In the surprise and pain of the moment, both of Jim's pistols go off, and without Jim's "volition" or "conscious aim," Hands is shot. The shooting becomes a matter of reflex action, and in a sense, Hands is made to bear the primary responsibility for his own death.

The island the treasure seekers were so eager to explore turns out to be a poisonous, disease ridden place, full of unpleasant surprises. Young children will not immediately see the island as an image of the protagonist's own state of mind, but that it is a sick, nightmarish landscape in which opposing parties of shifting loyalties wage deadly warfare will be clear enough. Stevenson may have moderated the violence of his story a bit out of consideration for his readers' nerves, but he played fair where it counts. For the thematic development of Treasure Island explores troubling problems of conscience. And though Stevenson was working within a literary form which more or less demanded a "happy ending" with a clear-cut resolution, he found a number of ways to signal even to his younger readers his misgivings about the values that make for success in the world in which Jim Hawkins comes to man's estate.

Stevenson's fascination with divided natures and conflicting impulses is well known. His strategy for depicting this sort of character in his adult fiction is to give his protagonist a "double," who represents some set of impulses or appetites which, if uncontrolled, can cause disaster. Frequently for such a protagonist, disintegration of the personality and loss of identity become the penalties of a failure to maintain the balance of a divided nature.

In Stevenson's adventure novels for children, Treasure Island, The Black Arrow, and the David Balfour stories, he chooses a symbolic method more appropriate to his audience, for whom it is natural enough to look toward parents as role-models. Each of Stevenson's young protagonists loses his natural father early in his story, and goes on to encounter a series of alternative father figures who function as potential doubles, future selves, suggestions of the kind of man a child might become, given certain moral choices. If the youngster chooses carefully, he may find a way to live which will allow him to keep his moral balance and live at peace with himself. But given the nature of this world as Stevenson sees it, such a choice is likely to be expensive.

Jim Hawkins has been brought up to be a decent, law-abiding boy. But in what happens to his meek and unresisting father he plainly reads an important lesson for himself. In the other older men he meets, he sees an inclination to bold action which finds an echo in his own nature. Jim's curious reaction to the death of Billy Bones may be our first broad hint that Jim himself harbors certain buccaneer qualities. But an alert reader will notice the ease with which Jim betrays Billy to his pursuers, will catch Jim's impatience with his mother's "honesty and her greed . . . her past fool-hardiness and present weakness," will see that it is Jim who advises her to take all of Bones's possessions in settlement of the pirate's debt, and that when the two of them are interrupted rifling the old man's sea chest, it is Jim who snatches the treasure map to square the account.

The formidable Captain Smollett, chief exponent of self-discipline and devotion to "dooty" in the book, is clearly the sort of man who becomes for others a model of right conduct. Perhaps significantly he is the one indispensible man on Treasure Island: the only person who is capable of navigating the ship on its return to "civilization." Jim admires the Captain, but resents being ordered to work because the Captain will "have no favorites" aboard his ship. The Captain's principles are not only uncomfortable for his party at times, but sometimes downright dangerous. Stevenson slyly underlines this when the Captain's insistence on flying his country's flag only helps the pirates to find the range of the blockhouse when they want to lob a few cannon balls at it. Fortunately for his companions, the Captain, who acts as a sort of conventional conscience for the group, is early disabled in a fight with the pirates. Once this severe moralist is sidelined, Jim feels freer to act on impulse, and Dr. Livesey begins to make some interesting deals with the pirates. Late in the book, Captain Smollett, who is "stiff on discipline" and disapproves very severely of Jim's methods, make it clear that, for him, how you play the game is more important than whether you win: "You're a good boy in your line, Jim, but I don't think you and me'll go to sea again. You've too much of the born favorite for me!"

Jim admires and respects Dr. Livesey, who is clever and cool in dealing with Billy Bones. Livesey prides himself on his ability to make difficult decisions quickly and to stand by them resolutely. He accepts Captain Smollett's code of honor to the extent that he blames Jim for deserting his duty, and calls him a coward. He tells Jim he'd done his best to protect the interests of those who stood their duty, and pointedly asks: "If you were not one of those, whose fault was it?" Yet Livesey's harsh view of Jim's conduct is not incompatible with his telling Jim that finding Ben Gunn was the best deed he ever did. When Jim agrees with the Doctor that he shouldn't have deserted, and says he deserves to die and fears only that the pirates will torture him, Dr. Livesey is moved to suggest that Jim break his word of honor to Silver and make a run for his freedom. Interestingly enough, the Doctor's impulse to save life, whether Jim's or the pirates' when they are ill, puts him several times at risk. It is clear enough to the narrator of the story that the only reason the Doctor is not killed by the pirates when he comes to tend them is that Silver has the imagination and insight to see that he will behave according to his principles as a medical man and a gentleman.

Though Jim reveres Captain Smollett and admires Dr. Livesey, the adult in the story he most resembles is that resolute player of a lone hand, Long John Silver. The charming but utterly amoral Silver, like Billy Bones, arouses mixed feelings in Jim. As Jim first imagines him, the one-legged seaman he's been warned about is a nightmare figure "with a thousand diabolical expressions." Yet the affable sea-cook easily charms Jim. After Silver's treachery has become clear, Jim is appalled at his former favorite's capacity for evil: "I had taken such a horror of his cruelty, duplicity, and power, that I could scarce conceal a shudder when he laid his hand on my arm." But Long John's wit, audacity, and vigor continue to have a strange appeal. And as Jim's own exploits begin to demand some of the very qualities epitomized in Silver, Jim becomes unwilling to judge the pirate too harshly. Late in the story, when Jim has deserted his mates, stolen the ship, and killed Israel Hands, he stumbles into Silver's camp by accident, and the old rascal welcomes him warmly as "a lad of spirit and the picter of my own self when I was young and handsome." His own conscience a bit uneasy, Jim begins to feel sorry for Silver as the tide of events turns against him. Jim says, "My heart was sore for him, wicked as he was, to think on the dark perils that environed and the shameful gibbet that awaited him." Of course, as matters turn out, the resourceful Silver emerges from his difficulties wealthy and safe, while Jim is left to his nightmares and to whatever release and enlightenment he can find in setting down the story of his adventures as his friends have requested.

Though consciously a dutiful and law-abiding boy, "a gentleman born," Jim Hawkins, like Dick Shelton of The Black Arrow and the David Balfour of Catriona, discovers in himself a frightening capacity for the sort of violent and ruthless action which his world appears to demand of those who would contest for its prizes. When the treasure he sought has been successfully won and the goal of his quest achieved, what Jim finds in that sandy cave is soberly, even grimly, described: "That was Flint's treasure that we had come so far to seek and that had cost already the lives of seventeen men from the Hispaniola. How many it had cost in the amassing, what blood and sorrow, what good ships scuttled on the deep, what brave men walking the plank blindfold, what shot of cannon, what shame and lies and cruelty, perhaps no man alive could tell."

Jim wants this treasure, and will receive "an ample share" of it. But he clearly dreads to become the kind of man who would feel quite comfortable with it. The moral dilemma presented by a world in which it seems impossible to succeed without becoming the sort of person you don't want to be is conveyed here not only through the use of a set of very flawed adult role models for Jim, and through the deadly imagery associated with the island and its guilt-tainted treasure, but also through Stevenson's creation of a world of romance, where luck favors, not the simple-hearted and generous, but the lad with his eye on the main chance.

While the world of romance tolerates a good deal of improbability, it is usually enlisted in support of the principle that the moral nature of an action should be made clear by its results. Here, as Captain Smollett and Doctor Livesey point out, when Jim forgets "dooty" he does surprisingly well for himself; and when he tries to do what the Captain would approve and behave like a gentleman, he very nearly gets killed. Still, while luck, fortune, what Dr. Livesey calls "fate," seems to support with its blessings a cool opportunism, Treasure Island is not a Golding-like fable of moral depravity. The authoritative voice of the narrator throughout the novel is raised in praise of duty and virtue. He regrets having broken the rules, even when following them might have led to disaster.

Furthermore, the Christian tradition in which Jim has been raised, is powerfully invoked to raise the possibility that the rewards and punishments of another world may balance the score for those fate does not treat according to their desert here and now. Stevenson's use of providential coincidence in support of opportunism, his willingness to resign final judgment to the hereafter, his narrator's readiness to offer regretful apologies for transgressions fortunate in their outcome, all lend the story a haunting moral ambiguity likely to be felt keenly by younger readers whose expectations of certainty are systematically defeated by the mixed signals the storyteller sends them.

As Long John Silver slips out of the story to wealth and freedom, a good deal of the vitality and excitement of the tale go with him. Jim Hawkins, like Dick Shelton and David Balfour, chooses to reject the life of active struggle for life's prizes. Jim says: "Oxen and wainropes would not bring me back again to that accursed island." The novel ends on a sobering note as the appealingly natural and impulsive boy with whom young readers have been encouraged to identify themselves stiffens into the older, wiser man who tells the story. Stevenson's genius as a storyteller for children is never more apparent than in Treasure Island. It goes far beyond his ability to catch children's interest, hold it, and satisfy their desire for the picturesque and extraordinary. It even goes beyond the superb technique with which he meets the needs of his readers at every turn. It rests, finally, in the subtlety with which he manages to make available to young readers a complex and ambiguous vision of experience, honestly rendered.

References

Daiches, David. Robert Louis Stevenson. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions Books, 1947.

James, Henry and Robert Louis Stevenson. Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record of Friendship and Criticism. Ed. Janet Adam Smith. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1948.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911.

——. Virginibus Puerisque and Memories and Portraits. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903.