Reisz The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories, "Robot Boy"

Burton's "Robot Boy" Illustrations

           Of all the poems in The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories, “Robot Boy” may tie into Carl Jung’s ideas and relate to Tim Burton’s life the most. Robot Boy perfectly symbolizes Burton as a child. He felt that his parents did not love him and would do better without him. He did not fit into the perfect mold of suburbia that his parents wanted him in, which made him feel like an outsider. Robot Boy has the same problem as the poem describes his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, so happy before him. With robot boy’s birth, his parents’ problems were revealed and they could no longer live in ignorant bliss together. Perhaps Burton’s own desire for self-expression made his parents unpleasant as well since they had no creative spark in dull suburbia. Like in Edward Scissorhands, the unknown scares the uninteresting suburban people so they simply cast aside people like Edward, Robot Boy, and Burton. Readers also see Burton’s neuroses about abandonment as robot boy, who we relate to as Tim Burton, loses his parents completely as they cast him aside as a garbage can. 

           Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s selfish and unaccepting fallacies are highlighted with their reaction to their child when they really should blame Mrs. Smith’s unfaithfulness and accept their child. The most important part of the story, however, is the final quatrain that reads, “And Robot Boy/ grew to be a young man./ Though he was often mistaken/ for a garbage can.” Applying Jung’s ideas here, readers see Burton relieve some of the pain developed from the abandonment and sense of being an outsider. The collective unconscious that Jung ideology promotes is the part of the unconscious that all human participate in and belief that the self, or conscious psyche, seeking individuation, or wholeness. He believed that there were “archetypes of transformation” on the path towards wholeness. We see these transformations in robot boy as he lay there not quite dead or alive in the beginning of the story but by the end has become a young man. Although his parents continue to treat him like a trashcan, life went on. This reflects Jung’s belief in transcendence and death being a part of life because it illustrates that, despite struggles and others’ lack of acceptance, life goes on. Robot boy’s parents fit the archetype of the wicked stepmother, like Burton’s parents somewhat represented to him, which is seen as a negative in stories. However, the shadow side of the psyche is something that one must simply come to terms with and integrate so that he may become whole, which is exactly the path that robot boy, and therefore Burton, is on as he has become a young man and realizes that we grow as life goes on.