Charlie’s Batman costume represents the protective identities that Charlie, Sarah, and Little Bee construct for themselves to hide from fear and emotional pain. Although four-year-old Charlie does not fully understand death, he senses that the world is large and frightening and knows that he has somehow lost his father, Andrew. After his father’s suicide, Charlie refuses to remove his Batman costume and will only answer to “Batman.” Taking on the Batman persona allows Charlie to feel a sense of power and agency, rather than recognize his own powerlessness and fear. While this helps Charlie endure the months after Andrew’s death, being Batman makes him believe that he is responsible for fighting the evil in the world, and especially that he is responsible for Andrew’s death, since Andrew hanged himself while Charlie was not wearing the costume.
The Batman costume thus represents the way that a constructed identity can help a person cope, but may burden that person with greater responsibilities than they can bear, whether it be saving the world or fitting a particular ideal as a mother or a refugee, like Sarah and Little Bee try to do. At the end of the novel, Little Bee ultimately convinces Charlie to shed his costume aside and be freely and simply himself—as she sheds her “costume” as Little Bee and shares with him that her real name is Udo. When Charlie takes his costume off, he runs and plays as a happy four-year-old with other children, unburdened by responsibilities that should not be his. Charlie’s freedom without his costume suggests though a person may protect themselves with a constructed identity, it becomes a burden that they are ultimately freer and happier without.
Charlie’s Batman Costume Quotes in Little Bee
That summer—the summer my husband died—we all had identities we were loath to let go of. My son had his Batman costume, I still used my husband’s surname, and Little Bee, though she was relatively safe with us, still clung to the name she had taken in a time of terror. We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refuges from ourselves.
He wouldn’t give up, but if I am strict and force myself now to decide upon the precise moment in this whole story when my heart irreparably broke, it was the moment when I saw the weariness and the doubt creep into my son’s small muscles as his fingers slipped, for the tenth time, from the pale oak lid.
“If I is not in mine costume than I is not Batman.”
“Do you need to be Batman all the time?”
Charlie nodded. “Yes, because if I is not Batman all the time then mine Daddy dies.”
“Inside, you know, I am only a village girl. I would like to be a village girl again and do the things that village girls do. I would like to laugh and smile at the boys. I would like to do foolish things when the moon is full. And most of all, you know, I would like to use my real name.”
I smiled and watched Charlie running away with the children , with his head down and his happy arms spinning like propellers, and I cried with joy when the children all began to play together in the sparkling foam of the waves that broke between worlds at the point. It was beautiful […] and that is a word I do not need to explain to you, because now we are all speaking the same language.
Charlie’s Batman Costume Symbol Timeline in Little Bee
