Coming of Age Narratives Do Not Necessarily

Coming of age narratives do not necessarily depict complete struggles, or complete journeys to maturity. Some narratives of coming of age depict a protagonist that reaches maturity only through a great struggle. Other comings of age stories depict a central character that strives to create a new and different form of identity but fails miserably in the process. The best forms of such stories, however, take the reader by surprise. "Where are you going, Where have you been?" By Joyce Carol Oates begins as a comedy, but ends as a tragedy. "The Man Who was Almost a Man," by Richard Wright begins in a tragic vein, but ends as a funny tale of triumph.

Joyce Carol Oates' young, female protagonist Connie is an apparently sassy young woman, beautiful and brimming with life and confidence in her budding sexuality. In contrast to her older sister, Connie is expressive and animated. She seems full of promise and defiance. However, her sexuality is really put forward and prominent before she is mature enough to use it in an intelligent fashion. Really, Connie is quite innocent, and her dreams about boys at night are vague. She is victimized by Arnold Friend because her assumed, projected identity of an adult young woman with concrete and physical sexual desires is not the real Connie, who is still a kind of scared little girl, trapped in a woman's body and a false, constructed adult sexual identity.

In contrast, Wright's younger, male African-American protagonist of "The Man who was Almost a Man," begins as a victim of society. Like Connie, he is forced to become someone before his time of maturity that he is not -- namely a hired laborer. He attempts to put on the persona of an older male, toting a gun, to free himself of the oppression of society and the stigmatization of becoming a Black man when he grows up. But unlike Connie, Wright's young oppressed adolescent finds a different way of creating his adult identity. After losing his wages because of a misfired gun, the young man experiences a revelation and skips town on a train, finding freedom from the narrow constraints of identity, of brutality or servility, imposed upon him by the society around him.

In contrast to both these tales, the language of John Gardner's "Redemption" is not that of questioning identity, but that of religion. Rather than putting the seminal act that changes everything at the end of the tale, and beginning the tale with a titular question, at the beginning we learn the young man has killed his brother by accident -- the story is how his family deals with this, how people treat him as a result, and how he crafts an identity out of this tragic event. The concrete language and event and sense of self Gardner's protagonist ultimately achieves emerges as far sturdier than the flimsy sense of self knocked down like the door opened by the protagonist of Oates' tale, and the fragile sense of self finally built upon the wings of train smoke flying into the breeze at the end of Wright's story.

Question 2: Young Adults Rebelling

The Yellow Wallpaper" tells a tale of a young, extremely depressed young woman who goes insane with boredom after a 'rest cure' of mental and physical inactivity is enforced upon her. The woman is unable to defy her husband and doctors in overt terms, because of the physical weakness of her recent pregnancy. Her social environment and milieu does not allow women to articulate themselves fully in opposition to authority. The only apparent way she can set her identity free is through her inner, rebellious life of madness. She becomes obsessed with a trapped woman behind the yellow wallpaper of her sick room, and symbolically hopes to free the woman, and therefore free herself, by peeling the room. However, this act of rebellion also signals her growing insanity, as well as the futility of a merely metaphorical gesture of rebellion.

Kate Chopin's "The Storm" shows a protagonist who is also a young wife and mother trapped in an unhappy marriage. She seeks an external rather than an internal solution to her rebellion, however, finding freedom in an adulterous affair. Yet ultimately, although not perhaps as psychologically damaging as the repression of "The Yellow Wallpaper," the sexual transgression is no more liberating than that of Gilman's protagonist. The language used to describe the storm parallels the brief and ultimately transitory passion that gives only a momentary sense of release of tension, just like peeling the wallpaper.