Jason's Blog for University Laboratory High School Coming of Age Novel 2nd Semester 4th Period

Throughout the story, Jason constantly mentions his grandfather's Omega Seamaster De Ville. To me, it seems like the watch becomes a barrier between his childhood and the adult world, and I think his interactions with the watch reveal a lot about his struggle to come of age and maturity. Part of what I think is interesting is how the Omega is framed as a reward for being mature enough. Jason’s dad is "grave as grave" when he gives it to him, calling it a "sign of an excellent watch" (Mitchell 16) because of its thinness and elegance, unlike the "plastic tubs" other teenagers wear. Even though he’s proud of it, he’s terrified of it. He balances a coin on the hiding place just to make sure no one has touched it. He is mortified when he breaks it playing British Bulldogs, and spends a year keeping it secret and trying to find a replacement. Jason’s decision to return Ross Wilcox’s wallet, despite knowing the money inside could buy back his Omega, is reall...

Introduced halfway through Fun Home, Alison’s childhood diary serves as both a window to her past and her psyche. What begins as a simple record of daily life, meant to rid of her OCD, quickly spirals into an obsessive-compulsive ritual of recognizing and confronting her own reality. Alison becomes haunted by the fear that her written words are lies, that by simply stating "I went to the park," she is committing a lie because she cannot be 100% certain of the absolute, objective truth of the event. To cope, she begins inserting a small symbol (人) between her words to signify "I think,” in order to protect herself from being dishonest in her own narrative. As her anxiety grows, the symbols begin to take over her diary, in a sense rewriting what she knows about her past. Alison begins to draw huge versions of the symbol all over the paper in order to save time, physically obscuring what she even says in the first place. In the beginning she notes: “Then I realized I could ...

In the Amazon, as Esther lies in bed recovering from food poisoning, she picks up a magazine story which revolves around a fig tree. It’s a tale where a Jewish man and a nun meet under a tree, touching hands as they watch a bird hatch. When their relationship ends, and Esther comes to the end of the story, Esther draws a similarity between her relationship with Buddy Willard and the two characters of the story: “We had met together under our own imaginary fig-tree, and what we had seen wasn’t a bird coming out of an egg but a baby coming out of a woman, and then something awful happened and we went our separate ways.”(Plath 55) However, her version is already corrupted: the magazine story depicted new life emerging gently, whereas Buddy showed Esther a clinical and traumatic childbirth. In a sense, her “fig tree” was poisoned from the beginning. A couple of pages later into the story, as Esther sits in the UN building surrounded by people she perceives as genuinely talented, the fig tr...

Throughout the story, Holden constantly mentions his “red hunting hat”. Something that I noticed consistently mentions his hat when nervous, pulling the peak over his eyes when asking Stradlater about Jane or putting it on after leaving Pencey in tears, and I think that his interactions with his hat reveal a lot about him. Part of what I think is interesting about this hat is how Holden is hyper aware of how “corny” it looks. He admits that it's “very corny, I'll admit, but I liked it that way. I looked good in it that way”, (Salinger 10) which symbolizes his persona of being straying from society. However, he often takes it off when he’s around people he actually wants to impress or fit in with, like when entering the hotel or when he’s trying to look "mature" at a bar. He hates "phoniness”, but he dislikes the judgment that comes with being different. By wearing a "corny" hat that he likes but then hiding it to fit in, Holden throughout the book is st...