“Growing up” is a very broad term that is used without a true, consistent definition. In essence, it describes and encompasses themes of coming of age and the loss of innocence as a person moves from child to adult. In many respects, people view this change as a specific, pivotal moment in a person’s life, such as an eighteenth birthday, or the day a person leaves their parents’ house. This idea of having a crucial moment in life, which provides the open door into adulthood, is portrayed in many novels. It is easy to find a death that occurs, or a specific event that causes a character to “grow up” prematurely, but many times, contrary to most beliefs, that exact event is not the turn of the key leading through the doors to maturity. It is …show more content…
Books such as Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger and To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee use the length of the novel to confirm loss of innocence in the characters. For example, Holden in Catcher in the Rye does not show his new found maturity until the end of the novel when he cleans the bad words off the playground. It takes a novel’s worth of experiences for him to “grow up,” just as it did for John Grady. Cather in the Rye is famous for its theme of coming of age, and All the Pretty Horses follows in its footsteps. McCarthy’s style is similar to these other authors as well. He has connected himself because he “evades the spotlight along with other notorious hermits like J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon” (Miller). This impacts his writing just as it impacts the works of these other authors, roughly making them more comparable. McCarthy’s “writing seems to connect best with an older tradition,” similarly relating it to other novels that do the same (Miller). This connection that McCarthy has with these other authors proves that this theme of loss of innocence as a process which happens more than people realize. Whether it is a hidden theme that happens slowly throughout the novel, such as in All the Pretty Horses, or the recurring, dominant theme of the book, like Catcher in the Rye, they can still share the same learning processes within the characters, making them the popular novels that they are
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Growing up is one of the most important stages of human life. It is the part when humans reach maturity, become adults, and attain full growth. Also, it means one more thing. It means understanding more about the society. Harper Lee's, To Kill A Mocking Bird, shows the different ways of growing up. There are three characters who go through the process of growing up, Scout mentally grows up, Jem goes through a mental growing up that every adolescent will go through and aunt Alexandra also goes through a mental growing up.
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McCarthy wrote the novel in ways that force readers to remove themselves from their comfort zones. He wrote The Road with a lack of punctuation that can make things somewhat confusing for readers. Some critics find that without quotation marks it makes the book hard to follow. But when I read the book I found that after the first fifty pages I understood when the characters were speaking. Finding that I had to pay a little more attention didn’t bother ...
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