An orphan is a child whose parents have died. Orphaned characters are extremely common as literary protagonists, especially in children's and fantasy literature. The lack of parents leaves the characters to pursue more interesting and adventurous lives, by freeing them from familial obligations and controls, and depriving them of more prosaic lives. Take into consideration the lives these characters had:
- Oliver Twist
- Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
- The Baudelaire trio
- Anne of Green Gables
- Little Orphan Annie
- Harry Potter
The TvTropes website notes several characters who conveniently became an orphan, plus one interesting aside:
Oddly enough, family outside of parents is never mentioned. Apparently no one ever has grandparents or cousins, although having an uncle (and sometimes aunt) as surrogate parents is common. Siblings (if they exist at all) seem to only show up for plot-based reasons. One wonders how the world manages to get populated when every couple only has one child.
Does Lewis have cousins in that small town near Milwaukee? Lewis became an orphan when his parents died in a car accident (The House with a Clock in its Walls, 4). This almost seems an easy way for a child to lose their parents. But what was the most extreme method for losing the parents? For some reason we’re reminded of how young James Trotter lost his parents in James and the Giant Peach (1961):
Then, one day, James’s mother and father went to London to do some shopping, and there a terrible thing happened. Both of them suddenly got eaten up (in full daylight, mind you, and on a crowded street) by an enormous angry rhinoceros which had escaped from the London Zoo.
Around the horn, indeed.
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