Growing Up From Childhood To Adulthood In Philip Pullman's Northern Lights

Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights novel expresses our world in a fictional way. Northern Lights is mostly considered as a novel for children. Therefore, the main focus of this essay is how the twelve years old orphan girl 'Lyra' grows up from childhood to adulthood and from innocence to experience due to her missing friend Roger and the mystery of 'Dust'. In order to support the ideas, this essay will mention growing up as a common theme in literature and how does it affect the protagonist's journey that leads her to develop from childhood to adulthood and from innocence to experience as well as providing some critics regarding this novel.

In the beginning of Northern Lights the reader can notice that the novel happens in a world that is similar

During the novel the reader can notice how Lyra develops from a child that doesn’t know much about her surroundings to become an adult who resolves the main problem of the entire novel. At this point, it is important to mention the popular word in literature 'Bildungsroman' which represenss growing up in a novel. It denotes a novel of all around self-development of the main character due to the experience during the novel. The process of maturity is very long in the novel, maturity doesn’t happen suddenly in a blink of an eye but it happens through the protagonist's desire and need

Lyra becomes a better person when she loses her innocence because she can protect herself and her friends from bad people. According to Pullman, it is essential for people to fall because sins make human learn which is done through curiosity. Eat the fruit, commit the sin and disobedience of God is the reason behind humanity's got out from Eden. This created gender differences and this why Pullman has chosen Lyra to be the sinner, the second Eve.(Casano, 2003).

In conclusion, Northern Lights is a children's fiction novel but it is not specifically written for children only, it is written in a way that children and adults can enjoy reading it because of publishing reasons that the target audience is not limited on a specific age. The author of the this novel ,Philip Pullman, has greater vision than it looks in the novel. He chose Lyra as the protagonist to be the New Eve who has to make sins in her journey of searching for her missing friend and find out about what Dust really means to develop in her life from childhood to adulthood and from innocence to