Weakness Symbols Necessary for Portraying Coming of Age Themes

A detailed Summary of Weakness Symbols Necessary for Portraying Coming of Age Themes

Weakness Symbols Necessary for Portraying Coming of Age Themes

Short stories often have coming of age themes. In the stories "A White Heron," "Shaving," "Eleven," "The Masque of the Red Death," and "The Bet," the coming of age themes are shown with the help of symbols. The characters never just magically learn the lessons; elements in the story help them along the way to acquire the knowledge necessary to becoming a successful adult. Stories with coming of age themes share deeper factors with each other than just rites of passage; the main characters all share something with each other. Many symbols of the characters show certain weaknesses they have. Each character's coming of age deals with the weaknesses the symbols portray. In some cases, the characters do not learn, but the readers do, simply by paying attention to what the character cannot.

This is exceptionally shown in the story, "The Bet," by Anton Chekhov. In "The Bet," the banker and the lawyer have basically the same weakness: they each think he alone is always right. This is nicely demonstrated in the beginning of the story after a heated discussion of the death penalty versus solitary confinement. At supper, the banker mocks the lawyer, and says, "'To me

In more cases then not, it is the reader, not the characters, who learns something from the story with the help of symbols. In "Shaving," the author, Leslie Norris, spends a long time describing things such as the razor and the shaving bowl with good reason. The razor is a phallic symbol of Barry's father, who previously was able to take care of his family without much help. Now his son shaves him with that razor. Since Barry shaves him, it is a sort of passing of responsibilities on to Barry, because his father knows he will not be in this world much longer. This shows the readers that responsibility is important to being an adult. When the author describes the shaving bowl, he spends a long time on the cracks, or weak points that have appeared on it and how it is a remnant of Barry's father's juvenility. To him, those memories just happened yesterday. At the end of the story, Barry opens the bathroom window and sees that "...the window was in the beam of the dying sunlight...knowing that it would soon be gone." (123). The sun represents Barry's childhood, because the sun is starting to set at only two o'clock in the afternoon, and Barry is not yet seventeen and will soon be head of the household. The reader can draw from this the conclusion that youth is fleeting, which Barry only recently discovers.

The story "Eleven," by Sandra Cisneros, is a bit more difficult to discern. The red sweater is a symbol of Rachel's powerless feeling. She feels as though she cannot control her surroundings since adults do not listen to her because she is too young. Rachel says getting older "...is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one." (3-4). All her past ages are still inside her, even at the age of eleven. The readers can see that a person is the culmination of all his past ages, as well as a person grows up and into, not away from who he is.

Cisneros, Sandra. "Eleven." Coming of Age. Bruce Emra. Chicago: National Textbook Company, 1994.

Chekhov, Anton. "The Bet." Adventures in Appreciation. Heritage Edition. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1980.

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Approximate Word count = 1687
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English