Narrative Point of View

DW ’s narrative point of view is third-person, limited omniscient. This narrative perspective can describe the actions, dialogue, thoughts, and emotions of any of the characters, but usually focuses on one major point of view character, often (but not always) the protagonist. In Dandelion Wine, the major point of view character is Douglas Spaulding, a twelve-year-old boy and the protagonist of the novel.

However, other characters become point of view characters in certain sections. Several family members, one of the boarders, and a number of townspeople carry the point of view in one or more sections: Doug’s brother Tom (two), Doug’s grandfather (one), and great grandmother (one); the boarder Bill Forrester (one); and townspeople Leo Auffmann (three), Mrs. Bentley (one), Miss Fern and Miss Roberta (one), Elmira Brown (one), Colonel Freeleigh (one), Miss Lavinia Nebbs (one), and Mr. Jonas (one). These characters are minor in terms of narrative time, but they provide a deeper understanding of events related to the novel’s theme.

SETTING

The setting is Green Town, Bradbury’s fictional version of his home town, Waukegan, Illinois, during the summer of 1928—about a year before the 1929 stock market crash that heralded the Great Depression. Certain locations within the town are important: Doug’s grandparents’ house, which is also a boarding house, the Ravine, front porches, and the countryside in which the boys run wild during the summer. The novel opens and ends with Doug in the cupola of his grandparents’ house, where he sleeps at times and from where is able to overlook the town. Through his gestures, he symbolically brings summer into being and then ends it.

THEMES

The major theme of Dandelion Wine is the development of a kind of self-consciousness of being alive, an awareness that is connected to the awareness of one’s mortality. Bradbury assigns the timing of this revelation to the shift from childhood to adolescence. As Marvin E. Mengeling points out in “Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine: Themes, Sources, and Style,” this novel is part of an American tradition of initiation stories in which a young protagonist matures through “rites of passage” involving self-discovery (Mengeling 878).

Doug’s rite of passage begins in a moment of self-knowledge or self-realization (epiphany) at the beginning of the book, when he discovers that he is alive. This consciousness of living is soon followed by a series of events that teach him that an important part of being consciously alive is realizing that one will die. Through leavetakings and deaths around him, Doug comes to the understanding of his mortality. This knowledge is difficult. At one point, worn down by the events of a hard summer, he nearly decides to die, but Mr. Jonas helps him “decide to live,” and Doug then rejoins the community both mature and committed to passing on Mr. Jonas’s good deed. This he does when he helps his grandmother regain her way of cooking for the boarders.

Another theme related to time is memory, expressed through the metaphor of dandelion wine, which Doug’s grandfather makes at specific times throughout the novel. Bradbury discusses the importance of the metaphor in his introduction. The events that became sections of the book were pressed out of his memory like the wine is pressed from the dandelions. Three pressings, at the beginning, middle, and the end of the novel, echo the three months of summer. The care with which the wine is made is shown by the careful and lengthy description of combining of dandelions, picked by the boys, with clean rain water collected in a barrel. The resulting wine is then bottled in cleaned ketchup bottles, one numbered bottle for each day of the summer. During the third harvest and pressing that ends the book, their grandfather tells Doug and Tom how dandelion wine is the best way to save the summer: “Better than putting things in the attic you never use again. This way, you get to live the summer over for a minute or two here or there along the way through the winter, and when the bottles are empty the summer’s gone for good and no regrets and no sentimental trash lying about for you to stumble over forty years from now” (236).

Dandelion wine becomes a symbol of time in the novel: a way of counting the days of summer, of storing memories to last through the years (but not in an acquisitive or overly sentimental fashion), and a strong sensory image that embodies the process by which Bradbury created the novel.

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