The Bazaar at Dawn Towers: The personnel for this scene is usual; there are the usual élite and the climber from the West. (Notice the social status of Oklahoma and Montana!) The futurist palace is a relieving detail.
The incident caps the social crimes of Buster; it provides the climax for part one of the story, playing off the vitality of the boy’s contention against the vanities and half-sincerity of his Aunt’s set. Like Buster’s passionate repetition, “I’ve got to know,” it is dramatic forecast. Here is the significance of the story: youth struggling with convention for its destiny.
The latter half of the story is fulfilment and realization.
Does the timing of this part—“and yesterday at dusk”—injure the dramatic reality? The writer suggests this is an account, a diary, a rehearsal.
Episodic Plot. The incidents of the plot do not progress logically, as steps in action having a consequential relation. But they are instances making the same character point, having this unity. In the important scenes the events are held in combination further by their centralization about three characters: Dr. Lake, Miss Edith, and Buster stand out at beginning, climax and end.
Account for the animosity against Dr. Lake in the boy’s tone and the story tone. Does the writer in her characterization of him caricature the doctor? (the emphasis on his eminence and his shirt-front in the opening scenes, on his fright in the climax scene). Contrast his appearance in the two parts of the story; his self-importance in the earlier scenes with his eventual sacrifice. The traditions reveal in the crisis their underlying sanction. Does his geniality in the final scene convince?
Cousin Edith, if typical, is set apart from her environment by a quality of humor and by her angle—as sympathetic observer of Buster. Observe that Buster feels the difference in her character. Is there a note of affectation in her manner? Notice that, though she is influenced by the aviator’s tirade, she is sufficiently herself to remark his manners. Does Buster work in her the magic of complete conviction? Is her wordy “gush” when she first sees the unconscious boy natural in tone and sentiment? She sees, remember, the “death-like” face, at the sight of which “the limp, shivering doctor pulled himself together with all his weary might.” Her words “baby” the hero—does one “tuck” a brawny fist under his cheek?
Buster is pictured most completely in his unconsciousness. Do the stubborn chin there and the sulky under-lip of the first scenes indicate an unpleasant willfulness? Offset this impression by details in the summary of his escapades which suggest a sympathetic kindness. Does he show in the struggle with his Aunts a personal animosity? Is the democracy revealed in the sailor episode typical of his age? Compare Aunt Charlotte’s speech for German methods with the Brigadier General’s on the making of the hero. Do the aviator and the ambulance-driver in their recognition of him reinforce qualities in Buster which are representative?
“Concerning ‘Buster,’ he isn’t the portrait of any real flesh-and-blood boy. But he tries to be the composite portrait of the fourteen-year-olds that we all know, and most of us own by ties of blood,—the tempestuous darling, the pride and the despair of us. As for the story itself, it is a well-meant but probably futile attempt to convince the Average Parent,—to say nothing of the average Aunt Charlotte and Cousin Edith,—that the abysmal differences between the Busters of to-day and their own generation are not so many conclusive proofs that Buster and his tribe are essentially inferior. On the contrary! For to my eyes, the rising generation is a rising one, with a vengeance, and o’ertops its predecessors with a disconcerting splendor. So the story tries to make this conviction clear,—and very likely fails. For one of my nearest and dearest was grieving only the other day, because her own particular Buster insists that his life’s ambition is to be a fire chief. ‘When we want him to be a corporation lawyer, like his father!’... As to definitions—could there be a compact definition of the short-story? I doubt it. It’s a universal experience, put into a duodecimo edition, but it’s a thousand other things, besides.
“Some day, some one with authority will answer, I hope, this question: Should the short-story writer be a writer of short-stories and nothing more? Or—should he write stories when and where he can, in the intervals of other, far more absorbing, tasks?”—Katharine Holland Brown.