Loss Of Innocence In 'Blackberry Winter'

Is the loss of childhood innocence a fact of life to be despised, or are people somehow better and stronger for it? In Warren’s short story, Blackberry Winter, the narrator reminisces as an adult on the day he lost his innocence and began to view the world for what it is. The arrival of a cruel city bum in his idyllic home, the harsh realities of death he sees in the drowned animals, the sudden severity of a woman he trusted, the worrying predictions of a good man, and the stranger’s final actions all compound in making this a day that will set the course of his life. The audience never truly receives an answer to in what ways this changed him, despite the narrator’s realization that it did. We are told that Seth followed the stranger and is continuing to follow him to this day. This may mean that Seth followed him into a life of cruelty, or that the loss of innocence caused Seth to follow him …show more content…
Throughout the film he experiences even more of the evil of humanity than Seth. He observes as men do whatever evil they must to preserve their own interests, he sees the corpse of a family friend swinging unceremoniously from the back of a horse, he watches as men are shot to death before his eyes, and he experiences a personal loss as the man he has grown to love and respect rides away from his life. I would certainly say that this experience caused a loss of innocence. Unlike Seth, the stranger in Joey’s life took a moment to explain the world before he left. From Shane he learns that the world is not at all as black and white as he believed it to be. Sometimes doing the right thing hurts everyone and causes as many problems as doing wrong, and killing always leaves an inerasable mark. There is no scene of Joey as a grown man to reveal who he became, but the ending of Shane seems to leave him with a stronger understanding of morality than