Innocence In Sylvia Plath's A Perfect Day For Bananager

Innocence is something that can only be lost once. Within both The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley there are various characters that lose their innocence in very dramatic ways. A character can lose their innocence due to the death of someone else. They can also lose their innocence by just being looked at from a different perspective by others, this can be seen through the characters Bernard and Rachel. ADD ANOTHER TOPIC Someone who has lost their innocence changes their personality and perspective on life, which results in them acting in situations differently than they would before.

"All things truly wicked start from an innocence,” states Ernest Hemingway on his view of innocence. Innocence, what every youth possesses, is more accurately described as a state of unknowing but not ignorance- which connotation suggests a blissfully positive view of the world. Most youth are protected from the harsh realities of the adult world. Therefore they are able to maintain their state of innocence. While innocence normally wanes over time, sometimes innocence can be abruptly taken away. Some of the characters in Truman Capotes In Cold Blood lost their innocence due to the traumatic events they experienced in childhood and adulthood while some had none to begin with.

Characters lose their innocence throughout American literature. What exactly does “losing their innocence” mean? Losing one’s innocence can be seen as a character maturing. A character may lose his/her innocence in ways including the viewing of a traumatic event, especially one that will scar his/her life forever. Losing one’s innocence can also be caused by losing one’s trust in someone whom he/she once trusted, catching a glimpse into the “real world”, or performing an act of immorality. The recurring theme of loss of innocence, as seen throughout American literature and reality, can affect a person and the people around him/her both negatively and positively. As a result, the audience can see the character mature through losing hope of dreams, becoming an outcast of society, gaining a new perspective of ideas, or gaining confidence. Negative and positive effects falling onto characters as a result of a loss of innocence can be found in works such as The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, and The Hunger Games; this theme can also be seen in real life through the effects of children exposed to violent video games.

As a little girl, I saw the world in the best light simply because innocence clouded my judgement. As a child, I was innocent of mortality, as a teen hope, and as a young adult love. However, later on that innocence took on the role of ignorance. Not in the sense of not being knowledgeable or educated on the matter, but rather knowing it all too well that I choose not to acknowledge it. Innocence can be served as an instrument to block out surroundings when problems arise. It is an illusion of reality to protect what the individual desires to be true to what is actual. In Wendy Cope’s poem “Reading Scheme,” Cope writes about an affair more from the perspective of children by using the villanelle form to illustrate the inability of the

“Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild, With a faery, hand in hand. For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.”(W.B Yeats) Similar to what Yeats talks about in his poem, many people feel a sense of horror as they discover that the world is not the happy place they imagined it was when they were a child. When it becomes time for a child to shed his/her innocence and take on the responsibilities of adulthood, one wishes that he/she could just run away from it all, just like the human child in this quote by Yeats. The world is full of weeping and horrors, but an innocent person can do nothing to help. Innocence cannot see injustice through its closed eyes. That is why it

As people grow older, the more we are inclined to learn; lessons of the world, personal identities, and more, but with these come the loss of innocence. In John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, the loss of innocence due to knowledge becomes evident; through the experiences of Gene, Leper, and Finny.

The lost of innocence can totally change the way people view the world. A person who illustrates this can be found in J.D. Salinger’s novel, the Catcher in the Rye. The story happened during the 1950s, in a small town in Pennsylvania called Agerstown. A teenage boy named Holden, who witnesses the death of his older brother Allie when he was only 13 years old. Then consequently, he blames himself all his life for the death of Allie. As time went by he starts to search for a sense of innocence that was lost in the beginning of the novel. Throughout the course of the novel, the author conveys that Holden is continually stuck in between childhood and adulthood. The author uses Holden’s struggle to convey that in reality often times people who

The first example of the children losing their innocence is when they are describing the transition from elementary school to junior high school. Each has found that instead of one teacher, they in fact had many teachers. Additionally, the girls they were once friends with, now different in size and grace, ignored them. This becomes apparent that things have change as a result of age.

The Cost of Innocence In the short story “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?” and the two poems “We Are Cool” and “When I Was One and Twenty” innocence was taken and naivetés, evilness, disobedience, and rule breaking play a role in these three works of literature. When breaking down the short story and poems, it is clear that each author included the influences that evil had on innocence and naiveté.

"Well, they[Bananafish] swim into a hole where there's a lot of bananas. They're very ordinary- looking fish when they swim in. But once they get in, they behave like pigs.... "Naturally, after that they're so fat they can't get out of the hole again. Can't fit through the door." In J.D. Salinger’s collection of tales doubly titled “Nine Stories”, He portrays the loss of innocence along with other themes. He does this in a very unorthodox way. In the above quote, A character named Seymour Glass is talking to a child about a fish called Bananafish. These fish are very naive and travel into holes filled with bananas to fulfil their desires but think they will be perfectly fine but they are never able

When Seymour takes his own life, we backtrack to his story and he is then seen as a celestial figure, ahead of his time and full of wisdom. Metaphorically speaking, the bananafish ideology depicts humanity in the postwar boom generation, where riches surround all people. However, amidst all the possessions, we cannot help ourselves and we continuously and relentlessly consume, regardless of what may happen as a result. We are each trapped in our own banana-filled hole, in which Seymour ultimately escapes from through his death.

A Perfect Day for Bananafish is a story all about societal flaws and imperfection, that contains writer’s craft and literary elements such as mood, symbolism, language, and imagery. The author Salinger describes a materialistic woman (Muriel) on the phone with her mother talking about her crazy husband (Seymour), and then tells of the husband on a beach playing with a little girl (Sybil). He tells a story about a fish, appropriately named a bananafish, that eat bananas and dies, after this the little girl says she sees a bananafish, causing him to have temporary insanity and go back to his hotel room where he kills himself. The reader wonders the reasons why Seymour kills himself, and what the bananafish story really means.

Innocence means purity. The purest of people find themselves in the darkest of times losing what they thought wasn’t even possible. Who would have thought Lucifer, made by God in the most perfect state of being, would have turned down a path causing him to be cast out and become totally lost in himself, losing the purity that was his defined being. A loss of innocence can be seen as a loss of a part of oneself. In Ernest Hemingway’s novel, A Farewell to Arms, multiple characters portray this loss of innocence throughout their decisions and actions that they make, that may cost them more than what they realize.

Within the story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Seymour realization of man’s inherent wickedness is reflected within his wife, himself, and within the bananafish. He finally comes to terms with the fact that no one will ever, or even attempt to, understand what he has gone, and still going, through. Muriel’s apathy towards her husband’s mental state further shows Hobbes’ theory that everyone is looking out for themselves, thus further supporting the “every man against every man” theory (Hobbes 76,77). She neglects Seymour and only wishes to further herself, a selfish act that Seymour mentions to Sybil as a sarcastic remark (Salinger 17). Not only does Seymour know that Muriel is evil, he also recognizes that he himself, is wicked.

A Perfect Day for Bananafish, follows the characters Seymour and Sybil and their quest for bananafish. In the very beginning when we learn of the honeymoon of the Glass’s, to the very end of the quickly and grizzly death of Seymour Glass, the imagery in A Perfect Day for Bananafish help set the mood the narrator