The reading
The bead. The reader gets to throw off the one constraint no child is allowed to refuse — growing up — and live forever in the unbounded freedom on the far side of it.
Engines
- liberation/autonomy · content · spine · ~ — The imposed constraint is adulthood itself, overheard as a sentence: Peter "heard father and mother... talking about what I was to be when I became a man," and refuses it outright — "I don’t want ever to be a man... I want always to be a little boy and to have fun. So I ran away." Neverland is the released state: the constraint thrown off, time stopped, no duty, no school, no end. The book's own opening states the law being broken — "All children, except one, grow up" — and Peter is the one.
The bundle. Single-engine. The flying, the fairies, and Neverland's adventures are all furniture for the one wish: the constraint of becoming an adult, refused.
Dual-use read. The counterfeit of liberation/autonomy is impunity — freedom degraded into license without consequence. Peter brushes that pole (he forgets the boys he kills — "I forget them after I kill them," he replied carelessly — and the book calls children "gay and innocent and heartless"), but the book is not selling impunity; it stages that heartlessness as the cost of eternal childhood, not the prize. The wish paid out is freedom from the constraint, not freedom from accountability — the bright pole, with its shadow shown.
Verdict. The cleanest liberation/autonomy specimen in the canon: the constraint is the universal one, and the release is total.
Evidence. ~ reviewed — Project Gutenberg #16; slot quotes confirmed against the text.