Bunny Junior’s Encyclopaedia

Bunny Junior’s Encyclopaedia is a reference book, a gift from Bunny Junior’s mother, and one of the objects through which he tries to hold on to her. Its entries feed his precise, carefully stored knowledge; its history as her present makes it part of a more fragile archive, one in which he struggles to keep her face and their shared past from fading.

Gift and Physical Presence

Bunny Junior’s mother gave him the encyclopaedia when he was seven. He remembers the gift as an act of love rather than a reward for any particular achievement: she gave it to him because she loved him. That association gives the book a significance beyond its reference function. It is a tangible reminder of the person who selected it for him, even as his ability to picture her grows less certain.

The book has a distinctive physical appearance in his memory. Its jacket is the exact colour of a citronella-impregnated mosquito candle, an ordinary comparison that makes the volume visually specific to him. Bunny Junior regards it as elegant-looking. The remembered colour and the reason for the gift belong together: he can preserve details about the object and the moment of receiving it even when other memories of his mother seem to be slipping away.

A Tool for Learning and Storage

The encyclopaedia helps shape Bunny Junior’s habit of acquiring facts alphabetically and storing them for ready recall. While lying on his bedroom floor, he reads well into the letter M, studying Merlin and the Arthurian legends. The thin carpet presses against his knees, elbows, and hip-bones, but he remains on the floor because the discomfort keeps him awake and alert, and he believes it keeps his memory keen. His reading is not passive browsing; he understands himself to be storing information.

Following the Merlin entry, Bunny Junior looks up incubus, learns that it is a malevolent spirit associated with intercourse with women in their sleep, and then looks up intercourse itself. The sequence takes him from a legendary wizard to unfamiliar sexual knowledge, each entry prompting another search. As he registers the information, he becomes aware of Bunny standing in the doorway. The book’s orderly chain of definitions thus meets the unsettled presence of his father in the room: Bunny Junior’s attention moves from an account of an incubus to his own father, who is visibly trembling despite his carefully arranged, handsome appearance.

The encyclopaedia also supports Bunny Junior’s powerful system for retaining and retrieving facts. In the Punto, he reads about the mantis, including the fact that the female eats the male head-first during copulation. He files this knowledge in a virtual, colour-coded box within a mental storehouse of interrelated information. The book is one source for a wider capacity that allows him to retrieve facts about subjects as varied as the Battle of Britain, deathwatch beetles, the Galapagos Islands, and the Heimlich manoeuvre. The striking contrast is between how confidently he can recover such information and how uncertain he is becoming about his mother.

Knowledge Against Forgetting

Bunny Junior’s factual reading continues at bedtime. As the Day-Glo planets above his bed rotate, he reviews what he knows about them, including Saturn’s rocky core and its layers of liquid metallic hydrogen and molecular hydrogen. He learned such details from the encyclopaedia his mother gave him. The book’s contents have become part of his nightly routine, joining the mobile’s motion and the comfort of knowing his father is nearby as he tries to fall asleep.

On another night, the glowing planets draw him into thought about Pluto. He recalls its composition of rock and ice and its relative size, then listens to his wristwatch tick. The ticking makes him feel that time is carrying his mother away: with each second, her image is harder to summon. He tries to resist that loss by searching his memory for scenes of her, including her pink velour tracksuit, her care for his bloody nose, and her applause when he rode his bike without hands. The encyclopaedia belongs to this effort because it is both a source of enduring knowledge and a remembered gift from her. He can recite facts learned from it; the book cannot, by itself, restore the person who gave it to him.

Narrative Significance

The encyclopaedia links Bunny Junior’s remarkable command of information to the limits of memory under grief. Facts can be organized, classified, and brought back at will; the face of his mother cannot be retrieved with the same reliability. He tries to preserve their shared past as if it could be arranged into fixed exhibits, yet even familiar scenes become incomplete when he can no longer clearly picture who is with him. Against that fading image, the encyclopaedia remains a concrete connection to his mother: a book whose appearance, contents, and remembered origin all keep her present in a different, more durable form.