Teddy + Tom Riddle

When I first read “Teddy,” I was reminded of that one scene in Harry Potter: the Half-Blood Prince where Dumbledore first meets young Tom Riddle/Voldemort at his orphanage. It seems kind of random, but Teddy reminds me a lot of Tom Riddle’s character, so I’m just going to list a bunch of similarities I see between the two. Just hear me out friends.

Okay first, Teddy and Tom Riddle both come from pretty broken families. Tom comes from

a very ancient Wizarding family noted for a vein of instability and violence that flourished through the generations due to their habit of marrying their own cousins. Lack of sense coupled with a great liking for grandeur meant that the family gold was squandered several generations before [he] was born. (Rowling 212)

Long story short, his mother, who was abused by his grandfather, uses a love potion to make his father fall in love with her, so they marry, but then the father finds out about the love potion and leaves the mother, so Tom grows up in an orphanage. While his story isn’t as extreme and sad as Tom’s, the reader can see really obvious tension between his mom and dad. The best example is when Teddy’s father, Mr. McArdle, yells at him to stop standing on his bag:

“I want you to get down off that bag, now. How many times do you want me to tell you?" Mr. McArdle said.

"Stay exactly where you are, darling…. Don't move the tiniest part of an inch…. Jump up and down…. Crush Daddy's bag,” [said Mrs. McArdle]. (Salinger, “Teddy”)

And Teddy’s mother, Mrs. McArdle, explicitly tells Teddy to disobey his father. You would not expect a happily married couple to tell each other that they’d “like to kick your goddam head open” or to dream about how “one of these days, you’re going to have a tragic, tragic heart attack” (Salinger, “Teddy”).

So Teddy and Tom come from messed-up families. So what? Okay, the main similarity that I see between them is they both have defining characteristics that set them apart from other children and adults alike. Teddy appears to be unusually intelligent and almost transcendental in his Buddhist beliefs. He even has the supposed ability to predict the deaths of others, like Walton and Larson in the story. Tom, likewise, is a parselmouth, meaning he has the very rare ability to talk to snakes. Tom and Teddy both seem to lack any obvious emotion, which is also certainly different. Teddy says that he doesn’t see “why people think it's so important to be emotional” and that he doesn’t “remember when [he] ever used them,” and Tom shows no empathy or emotion when he describes the bad things that he can do to other people: “I can make bad things happen to people who annoy me. I can make them hurt if I want to” (Rowling 271).

I’d also like to point out that they are both trying to achieve some form of immortality. Case and point :)