Names and Naming in Young Adult Literature - Scarecrow Press

More documents

Recommendations

Info

10 Chapter One Gary Paulsen’s How Angel Peterson Got His Name Gary Paulsen’s How Angel Peterson Got His Name is a collection of five autobiographical stories—really six, counting the one in the foreword—about the wacky things that Paulsen and his buddies experience while growing up in rural Minnesota. He dedicates the book to “all boys in their thirteenth year; the miracle is that we live through it.” Three of the stories, including the one that gives the book its title, revolve around names: Carl Peterson—that’s the name his mother and father gave him, but from the age of thirteen and for the rest of his life not a soul, not his wife or children or any friend has ever known him by that name. He is always called Angel. Angel Peterson, and I was there when he got his name. (1) The story is too carefully written to spoil by retelling its thirty-four pages in just a few excerpts, so we will only say that the naming of Angel Peterson is where the story begins and where it ends. Paulsen uses the incident as the frame on which to hang some very funny writing. In the second story, “The Miracle of Flight,” Paulsen includes as almost a sidebar an incident telling how Willy Parnell got the nickname of Stinky Parnell while also breaking his right ankle and getting out of gym class “for the rest of the year” (41). Willy had bought a silk parachute at the Army Surplus Store. The biggest one he could afford was a freight parachute designed to carry eighty pounds of freight, “while Willy came in at a hundred and sixteen” (41). Nevertheless when he climbed to the top of the water tower and “unintentionally invented base jumping,” he thought it was working except that “the ground seemed to be coming up pretty fast” and then he went through the roof of the Carlsons’ chicken coop (40). “Several of the chickens and a goodly pile of chicken manure combined to break Willy’s fall and keep him from killing himself” (41). Mrs. Carlson is quoted in the local newspaper under the headline “Boy Crashes Coop!” Her biggest worry is that the chickens will never lay again because “they have a powerful fear of hawks and they thought it was a giant hawk that came after them” (41). Stinky’s new name comes from the way the chicken manure ground into his skin so that it takes more than a simple shower to get rid of it.
The third story “Orvis Orvisen and the Crash and Bash” begins with There are boys’ names that you know will make a boy popular and successful and cool and able to talk to girls (more on this later) and will make him have a wonderful life and probably get rich and marry a cheerleader and have a hot car. . . . Clint is such a name, and perhaps Steve, although not necessarily Steven, and Brad, and maybe best of all Nick. You just know that somebody named Nick is going to get it all. And then there are the other names. (55) Paulsen mentions such names as Harvey and Sidney and Gary and Wesley and empathizes with any poor boy so naïve as to stand “up in the back of a new class and say, ‘Hello, my name is Harvey Hemesvedt’—not Harv, or Sid or Wes, but the whole name, Harvey” (56). All this is by way of introducing the title character in the story whose parents were “silly or addled or just plain cruel enough to give him the first name of Orvis so he has to say, ‘Hello, my name is Orvis Orvisen.’” Paulsen says they might as well have just rubbed “him with raw liver” and thrown “him into a pit of starving wolves” (56). Everything that happens to Orvis in the story— and there is plenty that happens—Paulsen chalks up to the way that Orvis’s personality has been molded by having been given the heavy burden of carrying around such a name as Orvis Orvisen. In the last story, “And Finally, Skateboards, Bungee Jumping and Other Failures” Paulsen adds a different kind of naming humor when Wayne, riding a two-by-four with skate wheels nailed to the side, grabs onto the bumper of a car whose unsuspecting driver is on his way to Hutchinson, seven miles away. The boys tire of waiting for Wayne to come back and so they hitch their way back into town and go to the drugstore for “Coke glasses filled with ice cream covered with chocolate sauce and peanuts which were called, I swear, Little Dicks.” The boys could never look at the sign LITTLE DICKS 15 CENTS without breaking into a knowing smile (100). Names for Fun 11
Page 1: Names and Naming in Young Adult Lit
Page 4 and 5: viii Contents Chapter 6 Names to R
Page 6 and 7: x Introduction Leslie Dunkling, in
Page 8 and 9: xii Introduction Sweetness (Walter
Page 10 and 11: xiv Introduction and because they
Page 12 and 13: xvi Introduction and to the Englis
Page 14 and 15: 2 Chapter One Names Expressing Hos
Page 16 and 17: 4 Chapter One Boyle, and Gloria Gi
Page 18 and 19: 6 Chapter One smile inwardly when
Page 20 and 21: 8 Chapter One senior in the small
Page 24 and 25: 12 Chapter One Louis Sachar’s Ho
Page 26 and 27: 14 Chapter One cabin. She opens he
Page 28 and 29: 16 Chapter One so the story ends h
Page 30 and 31: 18 Chapter One These shoes, these
Page 32 and 33: 20 Chapter One Henriette tires of
Page 34: 22 Chapter One The long and the sh

Names and Naming in Young Adult Literature - Scarecrow Press

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?