Loss of Innocence in Raisin in the Sun and To Kill a Mockingbird

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Recently, I have read both a Raisin in the Sun and To Kill a Mockingbird, both considered literary classics. They share a number of similar themes and character that face similar situations. Ultimately, they have extremely different plots, but address the same issues; some that were common around the time they were published, and some that carry relevance into current times. What I wish to bring to light in this essay is that in both novels, there are many characters that lives’ hit a shatter-point in the course of the story. This shatter-point is where the characters’ lives are irrevocably changed, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. What I’m going to explore is how these characters cope with the emotional fallout of what the aforementioned shatter-point left in its wake. From A Raisin in the Sun we have Benethea Younger, and from To Kill a Mocking Bird we have Jeremy Finch, better known as Jem to analyze. In a Raisin in the Sun, Benethea Younger is an independent, young African-American Woman that has high ambitions for the time period in which the novel is set, she wants to be a doctor so she can make a difference in the world by helping people. It can be determined that she follows a hero’s quest for identity, seeking to find out about her roots. However the point that breaks her spirit, is when she finds out that her brother essentially stole her portion of her father’s life insurance that was meant for her college education to invest in an liquor store, which as we later find out, will not return any profit because one of his so-called “partners” skipped town with all of the investment money. This shook Benethea to her very core, as by this point she no longer cares about helping people, no longer is o... ... middle of paper ... ...sitive, as they can easily degenerate into the lowest-tier of society if they cannot cope with the feelings caused by these events. Though both novels somewhat end on a positive upbeat, and this demonstrates the mastery of both authors through their amazing literary legacy in the form of these two novels. Works Cited Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. HarperCollins: 1960 Hansberry, Lorrain. A Raisin in the Sun. New York: Random House, 1959. Risa L. Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights,Harvard University Press, MA:Cambridge,2007, p. 249–251 Ted Honderich, Punishment: The supposed justifications (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1969), Chapter 1 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 266. Carson, Clayborne (1981). In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Harvard University Press

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