“Robot Boy” has an interesting archetype. Jungian archetypes can be situations as well
as people, and one in this poem is parental
alienation. Since so many of us feel
that gap between us and our parents, we are all able to relate to this event in
the same collectively unconscious way as the character archetypes that we
learned about in class.
Tim Burton’s life is a life of alienation and outsiderness that is highlighted in
his movies, as well as the poems in the Meloncholy
Death. In his personal life, he
experienced this alienation most notably with his parents, a reoccurring theme
that is seen in almost all of his works.
One reason he wasn’t close to his
parents was probably that he wasn’t the way his parents expected him to be. Sound familiar?
Robot Boy is certainly an alienated little cyborg. His parents don’t love him because isn’t a
cute little human baby. If that isn’t
bad enough, they find out that their Robot was born outside of their marriage. Knowing a person’s child is not actually theirs can make an even
bigger gap. Even though the story is mostly about the parents, we can tell that
he is shunned for his whole life by the strange since of irrelevance in the
last stanza of the poem (and robot boy grew to be a young man. . .).
The
parental alienation archetype, like all other archetypes that we have studied,
is based on this collective unconsciousness that we all share. These archetypes help us to make since of the
world because they give us all something that we can equally understand. So, Tim Burton uses Robot Boy in this common
situation, used in so many of his works, as a way to express and at the same
time cope with these childhood experiences.
Another
theme (which isn’t so much of a generic situation) that Burton uses in these
poems is this flip of what people expect when they have a child. When someone has a child, they are usually at
least very happy about it. In the book,
every time someone has a kid, this situation is flipped. Children destroy their parents’ lives in this
book, when the expectation in the beginning is a grounded and enhanced life. I
wonder if Burton has this feeling that he messed up his parents’ life.
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