A Sixteen Year Old's View On Literature

A Sixteen Year Old 's View on Literature Teenagers are complicated. I 'd know—I am one. We 're trying to figure out how to maneuver the world on our own, while juggling education with social life with all these crazy emotions on the side. One way to escape all the stress of it is a good book, but sometimes they can be hard to find. A good book requires many qualities. It needs to be well written, have an interesting storyline, relatable characters, and it needs to be inspiring. Well, that 's a lot to ask of an author. It 's no wonder they say young people never read. We 're not going to set aside our hectic lives for a book that doesn 't understand us. So what exactly are teens looking for in literature? Their Eyes Were Watching God by Nora …show more content…
Scott Fitzgerald 's The Great Gatsby tends to resonate very well with the teenage audience. Gatsby 's story is fun and exciting and dramatic, which appeals to teen readers. But it has an underlying tone of morality to come away with, which gives us the feeling we 're not reading the regular fluff that teenagers have a reputation of picking up. Reading Gatsby makes us feel smart, insightful, taken seriously. If a parent, or a teacher, or any respected figure of an older generation catches us reading The Great Gatsby, we 're likely to receive praise, and perhaps a lengthy conversation on the fantastic use of symbolism. I read Their Eyes Were Watching God over my Thanksgiving break, and so several times an older relative plopped next to me on the couch and asked what I was reading. When I told them, their eyes would go wide, they 'd place their hands on their heart and sigh, “Oh, I just love that book!” I 'd smile and nod back at them, but on the inside, my eyebrows would crinkle and I 'd ask, but why? I knew why I liked the book, but I couldn 't begin to explain it, nor was I prepared to listen to someone else analyze why they thought it was so great. Because the general point of the book was so open-ended, it was hard for me to discuss with another person. At an age when we are often underestimated as intellectuals, it feels good to be able to grasp a concept in “great literature” to the point where we can discuss an idea—and what 's more, actually enjoy …show more content…
From the moment Hurston introduces her, the reader understands that she 's a powerful woman: “Seeing [her] as she was made them remember the envy they had stored up from other times.” We can can see that she 's a woman with a story, worthy of our attention, but we 're not given a reason to like her yet. By the tenth page, we 're pulled back in time to see Janie at sixteen: “She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her.” I think this description is remarkably perfect for a sixteen year old girl—and I 'm saying that as a sixteen year old girl. She 's written like a pretty spring flower, young and bouncing and fresh and hopeful and desirable. It 's exactly how any young girl would want to be described. It 's all the things young women want to see in themselves. So there 's the hook. Janie is now relatable to us. But it only lasts a few pages, because by chapter three, she 's married off to a man she doesn 't love, who treats her like a workhorse. Quickly, it becomes clear that Janie 's cheery hope is gone. From that point on, her life is a constant struggle—one that teens don 't really want to read about, because we have that bright hope in our eyes, sparkling over the adult world like it 's a shiny new toy, and we don 't want that hope taken away. Janie 's relatability becomes far less obvious to young readers. She no longer represents that same bright light of optimism that Gatsby