It can be hard to be more than one sibling in the family and living with a parent who exercises both physical and psychic violence to only one child. These situations often results in children who try to be someone they are not because they feel like they are standing in their sibling’s shadow. Otherwise the neglected child can sometimes take it out on the person who is guilty of the violence. You can see exactly this situation in the short-story “Like Charlie” by John Boyne, from 2012, where a son of a violent dad is feeling overlooked in the family, and after many years in the shadow, ends up taking it out on the father.
The narrator in this short-story is a third-person narrator with an omniscient point of view without being obtrusive. In the following quote we see how the narrator knows about the father’s feelings for Nick and Charlie: “Lewis considered this for a moment, nodded and looked away. He hadn’t been talking to the boy, of course. Hadn’t even realized that he’d said what he’d said out loud. He hadn’t wanted Nick to come with him that morning. It was Charlie he’d asked.”
Before it is an omniscient point of view the narrator has to know about more than one person’s feelings. It becomes clear in the following quote that the narrator is omniscient because the narrator also tells about Nick’s feelings: “He wondered how much provocation it would take to make his father kill him. If he murdered him out here, where no one could see, he’d probably toss the boy overboard, leave him to the fish, then sail back to land and tell them about the terrible accident that had taken place out at sea. And no one would doubt him.”
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