[As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), a series on some iconic American cultural representations of the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn!]
On two iconic YA novels that fractured my innocence right alongside that of
their characters.
The early teenage years—those of late middle school into the beginning of
high school—seem to resonate particularly well with the idea of a loss of
innocence. I’m sure that kids who grow up in far more difficult situations than
I did, or who have to deal with loss at a young age, or otherwise are
confronted with the world’s darker realities experience the shift from innocence to experience, naiveté to maturity, earlier. But even those of us who make it through
childhood unscathed are going to come up against the harsher sides to life at
some point, and ages 12-15 seems like a pretty common such milestone. I say
that partly as a kid who was badly hazed by his cross-country teammates during
his freshman year of high school—but also partly the one who read John Knowles’
A Separate Peace (1959) and Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (1974) and Beyond the
Chocolate War (1985) in 8th
grade.
I’d be lying if I said I remember much at all of the three books—that’s
more than 30 years, and a whole lot of books, under the bridge. But what I do
remember are a couple of specific and very dark moments, of literal and
symbolic falls: the seemingly accidental fall that Knowles’ protagonist Gene
purposefully causes his friend Finny to take, a fall that eventually leads to
Finny’s death (among other destructive effects); and a profoundly disturbing
suicide scene in Cormier’s sequel, one that locates readers in the perspective
of a young student leaping to his death after being ostracized and abused for
his homosexuality by his peers and even a teacher. Obviously those weren’t the
first literary deaths I had encountered—in 6th grade English I read
Agatha Christie’s Ten Little
Indians/And Then There Were None (1939), for
crying out loud!—but they might have been the first in which kids my own age
were killed, at least in such purposeful and brutal ways (ie, not the
accidental drowning in Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to
Terabithia [1977], traumatic as
that was for this young reader).
Perhaps it was that sense of proximity and (in a way) threat to myself that
led these particular moments, and the novels in which they occur, to hit me as
hard as they did. Perhaps it was that all three books are deeply concerned with
what it means to be a teenage boy, in some of the better but (I would argue)
mostly some of the worst senses. And perhaps it’s a tribute to their
interesting and almost entirely implicit engagement with the wars during which
they’re set—Knowles does have his characters engage with World War II at times, and especially
toward the end of his novel; I don’t believe Cormier mentions Vietnam at all, certainly not at
length, but his titular war certainly gestures in that direction. War, after
all, has long been one of the most overt and catastrophic ways in which young
men—and their societies—lose their innocence; in my reading of these young adult
novels and their effects on me, I was led to feel such effects far more
intimately than might otherwise have been the case.
Next fall tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Images of fall, or The Fall, you’d share?
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