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Esme and her Particular Branch of Innocence

In class, we talked a lot about what Esmé means to the narrator and why he finds her to be such a comfort. Personally, I believe that Esmé represents a break from the chaos going on around him. Right now, about to go off to war, everything is uncertain, terrifying, and real. Stumbling upon the children’s choir provided the narrator with a small haven of innocence and purity when the world around him is everything but.
It’s very important to note that the practice the narrator witnesses is a practice instead of an actual performance, and Esmé, who he focuses on, is tired and over the whole rehearsal instead of enlightened and perfectly pure. Normally we associate the beauty of children’s choirs with the beauty of the special connection they seem to have with higher beings when they sing, as well as the fact that they’re all too young to be developing issues and negativity. The fact that the narrator finds the imperfection to be the best thing about the choir shows that there’s a deeper level to the purity he’s searching. Instead of finding solace in true innocence, he finds solace in someone who is just discovering the intrigue of a messed-up world, but still too innocent and sheltered to be yet affected by the perils of the world.
This is further explored when the narrator converses with Esmé and Charles. Charles is young enough to still have that childhood innocence and cuteness, with his knock knock joke and general rambunctiousness. Most people would fixate on Charles because his whimsical- and cute-ness provides a break from the perils of the real, harsh world. But for the narrator, Esmé offers an unconventional break from his own world. She’s trying to act like an adult and isn’t super great at it, but has also been through enough that she has some understanding of real-world pain from losing her parents. The trauma that she’s been through coupled with the lack of social graces that comes with her age has enabled her to be incredibly honest and blunt about everything, especially including her father and the narrator’s job. I think that Esmé’s honesty is one of the most refreshing things about her for the narrator. I can only assume, but in the situation that he’s in, looking at going to war and not knowing if he’s going to come back breathing or in a box or even at all, everyone around him is skirting around everything negative. Nobody would want to talk to him about the war or death, but sometimes the elephant in the room can grow to be stifling. Esmé’s bluntness is refreshing and enables him to let a guard down that he’s had to keep up for god knows how long.
To wrap up, because this topic can go on for ages, Esmé provides both a knowledgeable innocence and a refreshing openness that the narrator desperately craves at this point in his life. What do you guys think about this? What are some of the other reasons that Esmé and the children’s choir is so compelling to the narrator? Why does this experience stick with him so much?

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