Innocence to Experienced in Forbidden City

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.

People change and grow through their experiences and conflicts. For example, just 2 years ago I was a sixth grader. There was a lot more homework than I ever had in my non-accelerated / magnet elementary school. I had to work harder and for longer hours, but as a result, I was much more mature and knowledgeable. I improved my work habits and increased my concentration. In Judith Ortiz Cofer’s “First Love”, a 14 year old girl is in love with a high school senior. She does everything she can to try to see him more often. At the end, she thinks she learns the true meaning of love. In Richard Wright’s “The Street”, a boy has to go shopping for food, but he is constantly stopped by a gang who beats him up. At the end, he beats up the gang with a stick his mother gave him because he had to to return home. In both “The Street” by Richard Wright and “First Love” by Judith Ortiz Cofer, the characters start out as shy and naive, but end up as aware and wiser as a result of their respective conflicts.

I believe that the boys in Lord of the Flies suffered from loss of innocence in a very fast and drastic way. They had to learn how to move on from such a tragic and traumatizing situation and learn on the spot how to survive as well as well as how to thrive as a society and work together. Although the boys might not have succeeded in their objectives, but the efforts made to work towards these

Loss of innocence is a change in a person’s behaviors, beliefs, or perspectives as a result of experience. The theme of loss of innocence is often seen in not only literature, but also everyday life. During the Holocaust, many Jewish children were forced into concentration camps, where they endured eye opening experiences that forced them to lose their innocence. In the memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel writes about the experiences that caused him to lose his innocence in the concentration camps. At the age of fifteen, Elie was removed from his home and forced into a concentration camp with only his father left. Being in the concentration camp, Elie has witnessed and experienced many awful things that normal teens generally do not go through in life. Through these series of cruel events, Elie Wiesel experienced a loss of innocence in which caused desentization from the brutal events happening around him, caused his loss of hope in humanity, and changed his religious faith.

War is the armed conflict between different groups of nations or groups within a nation. In Forbidden City Alex Jackson experiences the impact of war and realizes that it is not a game. Before he goes to China he is inexperienced and cocky. While in China Alex experiences things that changes how he sees war and realizes there is human consequences to war. Finally, when Alex returns home he is almost traumatized by what he’s seen in China. Therefore he is more experienced and is now aware of the effects of war when he returns home.

A rite of passage is defined as a ceremony marking a significant transition or an important event or achievement, both regarded as having great meaning in lives of individuals. In Sharon Olds' moving poem "Rite of Passage", these definitions are illustrated in the lives of a mother and her seven-year-old son. The seriousness and significance of these events are represented in the author's tone, which undergoes many of its own changes as the poem progresses.

In A Separate Peace, John Knowles carries the theme of the inevitable loss of innocence throughout the entire novel. Several characters in the novel sustain both positive and negative changes, resulting from the change of the peaceful summer sessions at Devon to the reality of World War II. While some characters embrace their development through their loss of innocence, others are at war with themselves trying to preserve that innocence.

Alex is a 17 year old teenager from Canada, who is a protagonist in the Young-adult fiction book Forbidden City by William.E.Bell. He and his father who works as a journalist travel to China in 1989 to record events and report them back to Canada. Then a protest stirs up and the Tiananmen Square massacre begins. Alex’s father is captured recording the “illegal” events and is arrested. Alex fights back and barely escapes with a few tapes of the protest. He is reunited with his dad, and they return to Canada with tapes of the horrifying events.

As humans mature, the perception of a perfect world begins to reveal the horrors in life. This causes human’s innocence to slowly diminish. In a memoir, Night, by Elie Wiesel demonstrates how his innocence fades away as a teenager in a concentration camp. Wiesel experiences many horrendous scenes in the concentration camp. He has spent most of his teenage years there which traumatizes him for the rest of his life. He gradually starts to lose everything he has loved, which results in surviving alone. Wiesel’s loss of innocence causes his life to become more difficult by witnessing his father slapped, the disbelief in God, and observing children being incinerated alive.

Innocence is often a word used to describe children, they are pure because they have not yet become exposed to corruption. A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah illustrates what happens when innocence has been seized from a young child. When rebels attack Beah’s village, he is forced on a life altering journey. Beah involuntarily transformed from an innocent adolescent into a rebel soldier. He needed a lot of guidance and correction to reconstruct his virtue. The conflict of the Civil War shaped Beah’s character.

Shockingly in our general public there a time in one individual life where a tragic happens unexpectedly results in the loss of innocence and an increase in knowledge. Therefore, this relief in one’s life is unavoidable, however can be drawn out with isolation from reality. Some people experience this ablution happens sooner in life then anticipated. The survivor from the holocaust in death camps, lose their guiltlessness as soon as they step foot through the gates into imprisonment. In the Night written by Elie Wiesel, he described himself as a child, innocent teenager, whose innocence was torn apart from him as the result of the horror during the holocaust by the Nazis.

‘The Outsiders’ by S.E Hinton was written in the 1960’s, a time of rebels and outlaws. The novel follows the story of two rival gangs, the Socs and the Greasers. The Socs are rich and powerful but feel no emotion; they are cool to the point of not feeling anymore while the Greasers are in poverty and are often shunned by society,but they have a passion for life, the exact opposite of the Socs. The story also discusses the loss of innocence in the main character, Ponyboy Curtis, a young teen in the 1960’s. Throughout the story he is subjected to many forms of corruption to make him lose his childhood innocence and make him cold and hard. Hinton explains this message to us through the use of a poem by Robert Frost ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay ‘

There is good and evil in the world, but when impiety manifests itself in civilization, innocence fades. Encountering wickedness changes people’s mood and outlook of humanity. The pieces of literature, Night, written by Elie Wiesel; The Kite Runner, composed by Khaled Hosseini; and To Kill a Mockingbird, created by Harper Lee, all focus on the journey to adulthood marking one’s loss of innocence when the characters must confront the evils in society. Elie’s exposure to annihilation, the rape against Hassan, and Jem witnessing the injustice in humanity contribute to the characters’ development from childhood naivety to maturity, in similar fashions, where they all gain knowledge, understanding, and experience that alters their behavior as well as their perspective of life.

However, youth like Alex cannot be caught in the expected rubric of life and hence, they retaliate. Nevertheless, one cannot justify Alex’s actions worth applauding but Burgess seems to favour their actions as the only possible outlet for suppressed angst. In the first act, fourth chapter, Alex says,

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton is a book that gave the word “love” many other meanings, such as impossible, meaningless and incomplete. There were many unbearable obstacles that Countess Ellen Olenska, one of the main characters, had to face because of love. She was treated badly by many people and always longed for love but never obtained it. With everyone cursing her, betraying her and hurting her, there was one person who was always there for her. Newland Archer wasn’t only sympathetic towards her; he also began to fall in love with her. The love she always wanted. He was the man who truly cared for her and always helped her make decisions. Out of all the selfish people in New York who