Called "daylight gothic" by Mark Shorer [in his introduction to Capote's Selected Writings, "Children on Their Birthdays"] contains none of the dark gothic paraphernalia of such stories as "The Headless Hawk" or "Shut a Final Door."… Shorer describes the mood of the story as "buoyant summer rain shot through with sun," but quotes out of context: "Since Monday it has been raining buoyant summer rain shot through with sun, but dark at night and full of sound, full of dripping leaves, watery chimneys, sleepless scuttlings."… The mood of the story is a balance between sun and darkness, buoyant summer rain and sleepless scuttlings. It is gothic in the sense that Lolita is gothic; both have that delicate balance of nostalgia and terror, accuracy and imagination that Leslie Fiedler considers so important in Huckleberry Finn. What Lolita and "Children" share is a moving, affectionate comedy that is also brutal and shattering, a brilliant use of black humor that allows us to delight in that which should spin us into despair. Thus Capote places the wall that is art between man and the horror of life…. (p. 343)

"Children" is less subjective than Capote's adolescent novel Other Voices, Other Rooms; the narrator includes himself "at least to some degree" among "the grownup persons of the house," hinting that he will be a reliable narrator who needs little initiating. Common to the adolescent novel (and Lolita) is an unwillingness to grow up, a wish to stop time. Though this episodic story has a definite duration of one year, the sense of being trapped by a small town suggests timelessness: "It was the summer that never rained; rusted dryness coated everything; sometimes when a car passed on the road, raised dust would hang in the still air an hour or more. Aunt El said if they didn't pave the highway soon she was going to move down to the seacoast; but she's said that for such a long time."…

Time has stopped, but it hasn't; duality is the heart of the story. (p. 344)

Who [Miss Bobbit, a] combination Shirley Temple/Gypsy Rose Lee, really is, what happens to her as metaphor not as character is the key…. (p. 345)

Miss Bobbit is [Billy Bob's] dreams. The wealth of American cultural details suggests that she may be all our dreams….

David Madden [in American Dreams, American Nightmares] correctly points out that in America there is an implicit responsibility to live dreams; the American Dream is supposed to be the American Reality, although there is no single definition for that dream. "Children" is about some forms of that dream. (p. 346)

Two phony dreams, those drilled into us as education and those sold to us as entertainment, make up Miss Bobbit's voice.

A duality in Miss Bobbit's character suggests a duality in our dreams. Both innocent and tainted, she is aloof, demanding chivalry that goes unrewarded; yet she is also seductress….

The paradox of her character makes clear the inconsistent absurdities of our dreams, which, because like Miss Bobbit dreams have a certain magic, gradually seem natural. (p. 347)

"Children" is scarcely soft humor, though so many of its characters are gentle. Holly, heroine of the novella, understands what Miss Bobbit does not, that "it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place, so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear." Miss Bobbit's dedication to the imaginative realm of experience has been inspiring to the town. Even the narrator wonders if she couldn't come back just as though she were really there, but he knows that for her to do so the shadows must be confused. By instinct he understands what Miss Bobbit does not. Miss Bobbit's failure is that she responds pragmatically to phenomena that require imaginative response. She fatally mingles the modes, trying to live an experience that is only to be dreamed.

Yes, she is more than being thirteen years old and crazy in love, and "Children on Their Birthdays" is after all a story of initiation, Billy Bob's and ours, to the sad truth that those things we are afraid to show are not to be shown, for they are dreams, worlds private to the imagination. If we do bring them out and they grow to seem natural and we think we might live them, our dreams become illusions, and what happens to illusions Capote makes brutally clear….

You could see what was going to happen; and we called out, our voices like lightning in the rain, but Miss Bobbit, running toward those moons of roses, did not seem to hear. That is when the six o'clock bus ran over her….

                                        (p. 350)

Lee Zacharias, "Living the American Dream: 'Children on Their Birthdays'," in Studies in Short Fiction (copyright 1975 by Newberry College), Fall, 1975, pp. 343-50.