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mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island, for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose.
    After commenting that each child has a Neverland that possesses its own unique qualities, the narrator continues:
    [O]n the whole the Neverlands have a family resemblance, and if they stood still in a row you could say of them that they have each other’s nose, and so forth. On these magic shores children at play are for ever breaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.
    Paradoxically, it is the impossibility of capturing the fantastic experiences that Barrie himself sought to capture or recapture through the invention of an omniscient narrator who takes delight in playing with his readers and imparting his vast knowledge about children. This reading experience, which Barrie offers to adults, is in direct contrast to the experience that he had already provided them in his drama. Whereas the play, which can be equally enjoyed by children and adults, is demonstrative and filled with action that needs no detailed explanation, the novel, which is difficult for young readers to enjoy and at times ponderous, is explanatory and serves as a commentary to the play, with which, Barrie had to assume, most readers were—and still are—familiar.
    Peter and Wendy
is thus an anti-fairy tale that seeks to explicate mystery, whereas fairy tales simply display magic and mystery. It is a self-help book written by a doctoring author for those adults who have lost touch with their imagination and need to regain it through a re-introduction to children’s imaginative play. It is a prosaic novel intended to rekindle the light of a possible childhood experience that the narrator wants to preserve for eternity, or at least for as long as he lives—otherwise he would not tell it and explain to us so many details about the figment of his conceived notion of children’s imaginations.
    In her brilliant analysis of the Peter Pan writings and cultural phenomenon, Jacqueline Rose maintains that “what Barrie’s
Peter and Wendy
demonstrates too clearly for comfort is that language is not innocence (word and thing), but rather a takingof sides one word against the other. In
Peter and Wendy
, the line between the narrator and his characters is not neat and/or invisible; it is marked out as a division, not to say opposition, or even war” (
The Case of Peter Pan
, 72–3). Rose argues that the narrator is never sure and assumes different roles as servant, author, and child. Moreover, Barrie himself, as author, was trying to bring together two different strands of children’s fiction that collided with one another in his novel: the adventure story for boys and the domestic and fairy story for girls. Barrie was unable to weave these strands together satisfactorily; rather, he revealed more about the impossibility of defining children and childhood than he realized. “
Peter and Wendy
was…the response to a demand for a ‘classic,’ the definitive written text for children. Something definitive is, however, exactly what Barrie’s text failed to provide—either inside the book (the sliding of the narrator) or outside the book (all the other, more simple, versions which were to follow)” (
The Case of Peter Pan
, 85).
    While there is a great deal of validity to Rose’s arguments and many other interpretative comments in her book, she makes a major mistake in considering
Peter and Wendy
a novel for children, that is, fiction