What exactly is "coming of age"?
I asked myself this question at the beginning of the semester, and I'm still pondering the answer. I still think about this very often and I still can not find a definitive answer.
My beliefs, however, still hold true. I still think that coming of age is different for every person. And I still believe that you won't really be aware of your coming of age while it is happening, you'll have to reflect on the process to realize that it has happened.
This class has shown me a lot about the coming of age process. Finding yourself is a large part of it, but not only finding yourself. Coming of age also has to do with being comfortable with yourself and finding your place in the world.
Many of the novels we read for the class were narrated by an older version of the main character. They were reflecting on their coming of age processes and showing us parts of their lives that were important in this process. This supports my belief that you'll have to reflect on it to realize that it has happened. I found it really interesting to see which moments in their lives they thought were significant in the coming of age process, especially with a lot of them being non-conventional "coming of age moments".
Overall this class has been really helpful in helping me understand a little bit more what coming of age means and what can affect it. I hope others found it as interesting and thought-provoking as I did.
I agree; it's hard for me to pinpoint an exact moment in time where I "came of age". All I have are small instances, mainly mistakes, that helped shape me and force me to change. I think that there's a lot of pressure to "succeed" at Uni, and a large part of the Coming of Age process is to find out your own personal meaning of success. Does success mean making a million dollars a year? Or does success mean a white picket fence, two kids, and a dog? Or does success mean sharing a beer with your best buddies down the road?
ReplyDeleteEither way, if I had to narrate my own coming of age story, I'm not exactly sure what I would pick. It might be an entire novel where nothing of substance happens, or it might be a novel where I jump around from year to year and you slowly see the world around me change. The experience that have changed me are dubious at best; what if the things that I thought changed me, didn't really? But who cares? In the end, we've changed. We've grown.
Its interesting how much time we have spent thinking about "coming of age," exploring it, searching for a definition only to walk away empty-handed. Well, not exactly empty-handed. We have seen 6 prime examples of coming of age and perhaps we all understand the essence of maturation better than we used to.
ReplyDeleteI wish I would have written a blog post about this! I think you're completely right, coming of age varies for every person. After reading all of the books this semester, I feel like this sentiment has solidified for me quite significantly. I mentioned on Tim's blog post that I just turned 18 and will be graduating in the next week. However, I only feel different after graduating high school, despite the fact that turning 18 is a huge milestone for some people. Because of this class, I have also been reflecting on what coming of age really is. It has helped me to understand a little bit more on how I want to shape myself in the next few years.
ReplyDeleteI agree that coming of age is a process that we won't be aware of until we have some distance or perspective. So we can always speculate but we won't really know the moments that are currently affecting our coming of age as we move into our last year of high school
ReplyDeleteI know that Joyce wasn't the most popular author on the syllabus, but most of these observations can be traced back to what he did in _Portrait_ and his idea of epiphany--the ironic structure, where the episodes the character experiences can only be understood in context, in retrospect. In one way or another, all the authors we've read are exploring the same structural idea.
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