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ISBN
978-3643902887
Target Grades
Middle School
Publication Date
2012
Publisher
LIT Verlag
Number of Pages
205
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Summary
My Name is Myshkin is a philosophical novel written with children ages approximately 10-14 in mind. The book offers a fantasy adventure plot line interweaving narrative themes of ecology, mythology, psychology, spirituality and social justice, which interplay with its more purely philosophical material. Myshkin, the ten-year old narrator of the story, engages in numerous conversations with three school friends. A few of the many questions they take up are: whether one “is” one’s body, how we can tell what is real, animals and humans, youth and age, what is alive, the origins of evil, superstition and belief, whether there is a true “objective” account of anything, whether one can fully know or be known by another person, the suffering and injustice in the world, and ones responsibility for it.
Excerpt
“Everybody is happy in the same way,” said Beth.
“And what way is that?” Nixie said.
“Feeling safe,” Beth said. “Feeling safe and feeling you’re doing the right thing. Feeling good about yourself and your friends.”
“I think there could be a lot of people who feel safe and think they are doing the right thing who aren’t happy,” Nixie said.
“OK, then what do you think happy is?” Beth said.
“I don’t think we can be happy,” Nixie said. “We have too many problems.”
“You mean no one can be happy unless everyone else is?” I said.
“Well kind of, but that doesn’t sound exactly right. I mean, I can feel peaceful when other people don’t, I guess, but happy is more than that. What do you think it is Myshka?”
I thought a few seconds—well, I wasn’t really thinking, really I was just facing the question in myself, “What is happiness?” Then I said, “Well it’s not just fun, hah hah. When my mom says, ‘the simple joy of existence’, maybe that’s it: happy. I think it has something to do with being simple and free.”
“Oh no!” Tracey said. “Another big word. Free!”
“Yes,” Beth said. “Not worrying.”
“Like—like being a river,” I said. “Just being a river. It can’t do anything else than what it does, and it doesn’t want to do anything else than what it does. And whatever happens next happens next. Tere’s nothing that’s supposed to happen. It’s not comparing itself to anything. It’s not saying to itself, I wish I could be bigger, or smaller, or faster, or slower, or I wish I could be a mountain instead of a river. It’s free. It just, like, rivers. It just rivers along.”
“But a river doesn’t know it’s happy. Don’t you have to know you’re happy to be happy?” Nixie said.
“No, the opposite,” I said. “When people say they’re happy I don’t know whether to believe them or not. It’s like they’re trying to persuade themselves of something.”
“Somebody could invent a machine to check them,” Tracey said. “Like a lie detector test. You put a silver dollar in the machine, then put your hand on the piece of glass, and you get a color—black to orange. Or no, maybe purple.” He grinned.
Nobody said anything for a little while.
“But the way you are saying ‘happy’ and ‘free’,” Nixie said, “in that case criminals could be happy, and murderers, and all kinds of people who hurt other people.”
“Could they?” I said.
“Yeah, cause it has nothing to do with being good.”
“Isn’t a river good? Isn’t everything good when it just is what it is?” Beth said.
“No. We’re not rivers,” Nixie said. “We have to try and try to be good. What’s good about us is not that we are good, but that we try to be good.”
“And what’s good?” Tracey said.
We laughed. We were getting tired.
Keywords
philosophical fiction for children; Greek mythology; philosophy of nature; social justice
Disciplines
Education | Education Policy | Philosophy | Social Justice
Recommended Citation
Kennedy, David (2012) My Name Is Myshkin: A Philosophical Novel for Children. Münster, Germany: LIT Verlag.
