Character Analysis
The boy enters Neil's life around the same time as Brenda. He's a young black child who comes into the library looking for art books. As we discuss in "What's Up With the Title?," he's fascinated with the reproductions of Paul Gauguin's paintings of Tahiti. Neil fights for the boy's rights to look at the book without being bothered by Neil's racist co-worker John McKee. We don't get to learn anything about the boy's life outside the library. Neil never sees him again when he returns to the library after his vacation.
The boy is important to the story because he helps Neil seem like a sympathetic character. He also helps Neil see that his work at the library is meaningful. The boy's character helps readers imagine what life might have been like for a black child in America in the late 1950s, before the Civil Rights Movement, when a child could get kicked out of a library just for being black. Yeah, that sounds pretty counterproductive, not to mention terrible.