An Awakening In Boys And Girls By Alice Munro

An Awakening Coming of age literature can be defined as literature that follows the progression of a youth as he or she changes from adolescence to adulthood, awakens to whom he or she is, and becomes aware of the world around him or her. These coming of age narrative describes the time when family, mentors, friends, peers, relationships, and community influence and shape an adolescent into the person they will one day be. And, it contains similar characteristics such as, innocence of the world’s expectations, the disappointment of discovering life is not as black and white as once perceived, tension between family members or peers, conflicts within oneself as understanding of the world changes, wisdom as one matures, and acceptance and realization that the adult world is complex and difficult. In the short story “Boys and Girls,” Alice Munro successfully explores the protagonist’s innocence of the world’s stereotypes, conflict between …show more content…
For instance, the protagonist struggles with wanting to be in the barn with her father and discovering the world says a young girl belongs in the house with her mother. To demonstrate the conflict Munro writes, “This winter I also began to hear a great deal more on the theme my mother had sounded when she had been talking in front of the barn”. “I no longer felt safe.” In addition to hearing who the world says she should be, she discovers herself feeling different after observing her dad kill the horse, Mack and she explains “I did not have any great feelings of horror”, but “yet I felt a little ashamed, and there was a new wariness, a sense of holding-off, in my attitude to my father and his work” (Munro). The protagonist’s resistance to who she wants to be and who the world says she should be is the conflict that begins her transition from child to young