Character analysis
The Children
in Kamikaze by Beatrice Garland
The Children are the kamikaze pilot's sons and daughters who, along with their mother and sister (The Daughter), initially take part in the collective act of shunning their father after he returns home from his failed suicide mission. Together, they embody the social and familial pressure of a community steeped in a culture of wartime honor: their silence and avoidance of their father stem not from personal hatred but from adherence to a communal code that deems his survival shameful. They act as a chorus, reflecting the village's judgment and amplifying the emotional isolation the pilot feels within his own household.
Their journey is one of quiet, painful complicity. Unlike The Daughter, who ultimately breaks the silence in search of understanding, The Children remain largely indistinct and passive—their ongoing refusal to speak to or acknowledge their father creates a lasting wound. This makes them a powerful symbol of how shame operates not through dramatic confrontations but through ordinary erasure. They do not harbor hate; they simply follow the unspoken rules passed down by their mother and reinforced by community expectations.
Key traits include conformity, silence, and a kind of innocent cruelty—they are young enough that their shunning might be more imitation than conviction, which adds to the tragedy of their role. They represent a generation shaped by the demands of war, inheriting its moral certainties without yet having the ability to question them.
Who is The Children?
The children in Beatrice Garland's "Kamikaze" are the sons and daughters of the pilot who turns his aircraft back from its suicide mission and returns home alive. They receive no individual names, no distinguishing voices, and no separate lines of dialogue—a deliberate authorial choice that renders them a single, undifferentiated social force rather than a collection of personalities. Their anonymity is a statement: Garland uses them to embody the communal judgment of wartime Japan, compressing an entire culture's investment in honour and sacrifice into the figures of young children who are too small to fully understand what they are enforcing and too obedient not to enforce it anyway.
What is The Children's arc and motivation?
The children's arc is, paradoxically, an arc of stasis. They begin the poem complicit in their father's ostracism and they remain so. While the daughter steps back from that silence to reconstruct her father's story with compassion—asking, implicitly, what did he see on that water before he turned?—the children never reach that moment of independent reflection. Their motivation is not hatred; Garland suggests that their silence is inherited rather than chosen. They follow their mother's refusal to acknowledge the pilot, a refusal sanctioned by the grandfather's rejection. The children are, in this sense, the final and most vulnerable link in a chain of conformity, absorbing the community's moral code before they have the cognitive or emotional tools to interrogate it.
What are The Children's key moments?
Because the poem concentrates its imagery on the pilot's flight and the daughter's retrospective narration, the children appear most forcefully in the lines describing the domestic aftermath of the pilot's return. The poem tells us that her mother never spoke again in his presence and that the children were taught to shun him—the passive construction of "were taught" is crucial. It locates agency not in the children themselves but in the social mechanism working through them. The verb "shun" carries the full weight of communal sanction: it is deliberate, sustained, and public. Their silence is not a single dramatic event but an ongoing erasure, repeated at every meal, every threshold, every moment of ordinary family life. This daily, undramatic quality is precisely what makes it devastating.
What are The Children's most important relationships?
With the pilot: The children deny their father his most basic social role. By refusing to speak to or acknowledge him, they strip him of his identity as a parent—arguably a crueller consequence than any official military punishment. He survives a death mission only to be made socially dead within his own household.
With the wife/mother: The mother's silence is the template the children replicate. Garland's poem illustrates how shame is transmitted generationally: the wife models the behaviour, and the children mirror it, making her the invisible architect of their cruelty even when she is not directly present.
With the daughter: The daughter's divergence is what throws the children's conformity into sharpest relief. Her decision to narrate her father's story—to imagine his wonder at the tuna, the dark-bellied mackerel—is an act of imaginative empathy the children never perform. Their continued silence, measured against her eventual speech, positions them as a warning about what happens when inherited codes go unexamined.
With the grandfather: The grandfather's rejection of his own son provides the elder authority that legitimises the whole structure of shunning. The children absorb this as simply the natural order of things, which is precisely Garland's point: shame cultures do not require conscious cruelty. They require only that each generation teach the next one not to ask questions.
How is The Children connected to the other characters?
- The Kamikaze Pilot
The Children are his sons and daughters who collectively shun him after his return, denying him the role of father through sustained silence and avoidance—an act that deepens his isolation and underscores the personal cost of his survival.
- The Wife
The Children follow their mother's lead in ostracizing the pilot; her refusal to acknowledge him sets the behavioral template they replicate, making her the implicit authority behind their collective silence.
- The Daughter
The Daughter stands apart from The Children by eventually breaking the silence and narrating her father's story with empathy. Her divergence from the group highlights The Children's continued conformity and makes her act of understanding all the more significant.
- The Grandfather
The grandfather's own rejection of the pilot reinforces the shame-based code that The Children absorb and enact; his authority as an elder legitimizes the family's collective shunning, which The Children perpetuate.
Questions readers ask about The Children
Why do the Children shun their father in 'Kamikaze'?
The Children shun their father not out of personal hatred but out of conformity to a communal code of wartime honour that deems his survival shameful. Garland presents their silence as inherited rather than chosen — they follow their mother's refusal to acknowledge the pilot, which is sanctioned by the grandfather's rejection. Too young to interrogate the values they absorb, they replicate the community's judgment automatically, making their cruelty a product of obedience rather than malice.
How does Garland show that the Children's shunning is taught rather than chosen?
Garland uses the passive construction "were taught to shun him" to locate agency in the social mechanism rather than in the children themselves. This grammatical choice shifts responsibility away from the children and onto the family and community structures working through them. The word "shun" carries the weight of deliberate, sustained communal sanction, yet the passive voice reveals that the children are as much instruments of that sanction as they are enforcers of it.
How do the Children's actions affect the kamikaze pilot?
The Children deny their father his most basic social role, stripping him of his identity as a parent through sustained silence and avoidance. By refusing to speak to or acknowledge him, they render him socially dead within his own household — a fate Garland frames as arguably crueller than any official military punishment. He survives a death mission only to be erased at every meal, every threshold, and every ordinary moment of family life.
What is the relationship between the Children and the Daughter in 'Kamikaze'?
The Daughter stands apart from the Children by eventually breaking the silence and narrating her father's story with imaginative empathy, picturing his wonder at the sea creatures below his aircraft. The Children never reach that moment of independent reflection; their conformity continues unexamined. Garland uses this contrast deliberately — the Daughter's divergence throws the Children's ongoing compliance into sharpest relief, positioning her act of understanding as the moral counterpoint to their collective erasure of their father.
What role does the grandfather play in shaping the Children's behaviour?
The grandfather's own rejection of his son provides the elder authority that legitimises the whole structure of shunning within the family. The Children absorb his stance as simply the natural order of things, which is precisely Garland's point: shame cultures do not require conscious cruelty, only that each generation teaches the next not to ask questions. His authority makes the children's complicity feel inevitable rather than deliberate.
What do the Children symbolise in 'Kamikaze'?
The Children symbolise how shame operates not through dramatic confrontation but through ordinary, daily erasure. Rendered anonymous and undifferentiated by Garland — given no individual names, voices, or dialogue — they function as a single social force compressing an entire culture's investment in wartime honour. They also represent a generation shaped by inherited moral certainties, absorbing the demands of war before they possess the capacity to question them, which adds a layer of tragedy to their role as enforcers.
Is the Children's cruelty in 'Kamikaze' innocent or culpable?
Garland presents the Children's cruelty as a form of innocent complicity — they are young enough that their shunning may be more imitation than conviction, yet the harm they cause is real and lasting. This ambiguity is central to the poem's tragedy: the children are simultaneously victims of the same cultural pressure that destroys their father and active participants in his isolation. Garland refuses to fully absolve them, using their youth to question where inherited ideology ends and personal moral responsibility begins.
How does the mother's behaviour shape the Children's treatment of their father?
The mother's refusal to acknowledge the pilot is the behavioural template the Children replicate, making her the invisible architect of their collective silence. Garland illustrates how shame is transmitted generationally: the wife models the ostracism, and the children mirror it, often without her needing to be directly present. This makes the mother a powerful, if quiet, authority figure — her conduct alone is enough to sustain and legitimise the children's ongoing erasure of their father.
Use this in your essay
Silence as violence: Explore how Garland constructs the children's wordlessness as an active, damaging force rather than mere absence, and what this suggests about how shame operates through everyday social behaviour rather than dramatic confrontation.
Innocence and complicity: To what extent does the children's youth make them victims of the same cultural pressure that destroys their father? Can a poem hold innocent agents responsible for harmful acts?
Inherited ideology: Analyse how Garland uses the passive voice ("were taught to shun") to implicate social and familial structures in the children's behaviour, questioning where individual moral responsibility begins.
Collective vs. individual: Compare the children as an undifferentiated group with the daughter as a named, individualised narrator. What does Garland suggest about the relationship between individuality and moral courage?
The cost of survival: Use the children's response as a lens for examining the poem's central irony—that the pilot's choice to live becomes, through his family's reaction, a form of living death—and consider what Garland implies about the values of a society that punishes survival.