Ulrich Zaum

J.M. Barrie is one of the ‘lost’ boys, too. After the death of his older brother, he stopped growing and never got taller than 152 centimetres his whole life. In his stories, he dwells on his lost brother who has gone away to his Neverland, to a life without a past or future, without friends, siblings, father or mother.
In the often very unusually diffuse and stubbornly indeterminate web of the novel’s story, suddenly, briefly, radically, the huge, unnameable horrors of childhood emerge. Feelings of loss and death.
And the family, the supposed seat of security, is almost surreal, completely soulless and hollow. In fact, family here represents the opposite of security; the children are somewhat lost in this reality. They are fed and looked after, and still seem at heart to be homeless, as if they are not really there. Neverland is no not a nice little getaway, it’s not a playful jaunt into fantasy. Neverland represents a quite forlorn search for life, for a place in which one can escape a state of unreality.
Peter Pan is sad and beautiful and, in its perception of how lost children can feel in their existence, goes much further than the intellectual horizons of its times. That is probably the deeply moving nerve of the piece – childhood perceptions of being lost and the awareness of their own identity that emerges out of this. (Ulrich Zaum)