Children Protagonists

I was torn between wanting to post about The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe again and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, so I decided to find a way to write about both. When comparing the two texts, the very first common element that I noticed was the use of children as protagonists. I find the choice of protagonist interesting, because the previous fantasy texts that we have analyzed have been adult protagonists. Of course, both Narnia and Harry Potter are geared for an adolescent audience and the others were not, but the effect that the age of the protagonist has the story cannot be avoided.

In our first text, Phantastes, Anodos has just turned twenty-one years old. In The Wood Beyond the World, Walter was "but of five and twenty winters". In The Hobbit, Bilbo is fifty years old. All of these characters have come of age. The Pevensie children, however, as well as Harry Potter are children and do not seem to be looking towards the coming of age at all. In fact, the Harry Potter series ends just as Harry comes to wizarding age.

The children in these stories, for one thing, are not as concerned with society and government as an adult protagonist. Although the child's book can do just as much cultural work as a book like The Wood Beyond the World (as we saw exampled by analyzing The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), the children protagonists do not seem as responsible for their assessments of or engagements in their society. They retain innocence of the world, and their lack of reason is seen as excusable. They are not able to utilize logic and reason like an adult would, but rather rely heavily on intuition. It is because they are children that they seem to exempt themselves from some level of responsibility for their words and actions.

I find the place of logic and reason very interesting in these stories, and it seems especially highlighted when the protagonists are children. Is it fair for us as deconstructive readers to judge the characters as harshly as we would an adult protagonist such as Bilbo or Anodos? Does the children's lack of reason prevent them from being effect heroes? If the protagonist in Harry Potter was a highly logical adult, how acutely would the story be impacted?