All following posts will be for The Coming-of-Age Novel course, no more 20th Century Novel posts will be made.

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Sag Harbor and the harsh reality of a summer job

 In Sag Harbor, Colson Whitehead does a great job narrating the idea of growing up, and reaching the stage of adolescence where you start to gain more responsibilities, such as being able to pay for your own things. To get this money, one must work, and Whitehead's experiences growing up that are detailed in the novel are quite similar to many teenager's experiences in the workplace. Over this past summer, I got my first summer job, and was eager to work to get my own money, as Benji does the same in the novel.  Now, looking back I don't know what I was expecting. I know I wasn't expecting sunshine and rainbows, but whatever I was expecting, I should have expected both better and worse of some certain aspects. Food service jobs? Good. People who come to buy things from food service jobs? Less good. People are who truly make the work experience bad or good, and I dealt with my fair share of bad over the summer, just as Benji does in the novel. Dirty clothes, coming home ...
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The Bell Jar and early mental health representation

 In The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, we see an early representation of mental health institutions, and how bad they were compared to now. If we look at mental health institutions now, we don't typically see electroshock therapy being used, more things are focused on bettering the person instead of electrocuting them until they conform to society's standards. The use of lobotomization is also a much more frowned upon practice, as they were done very unprofessionally in their early days, where they were named icepick lobotomies, super ineffective and unsafe, and especially unsanitary procedures that would be a tool, most commonly an icepick, being placed through a patient's eye and going through to the brain, and disconnecting certain nerve endings. No anesthesia was used in these procedures either, and we see a character in the novel who has undergone a lobotomy and it completely changes a person's behaviors and mannerisms. I believe if this book took place in more modern t...
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Mental Health Represented in Books

     While reading Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway , I couldn't help but think about the mental health aspect of the story, and it led me to think about other stories involving such topics. First and foremost, the representation of mental health in Mrs. Dalloway  is one of the better ones I have seen, quite possibly because it was written by someone who knows what it's like to endure these feelings. If we take a look at another book that doesn't do it any justice, we can clearly see the difference between experience and wanting to make something young people will eat up and pay for. Thirteen Reasons Why , by Jay Asher is a good example of a bad thing. Jay Asher wrote about Hannah Baker, a high school freshman girl and why she commits suicide. Jay Asher has no experience with any of this, and if you read the book it's very obvious how much he doesn't know what he's talking about. Comparatively, Virginia Woolf has these experiences of mental health strugg...
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