The Bildungsroman In Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John

Tim Winton’s short story, ‘The Water Was Dark and it Went Forever Down’, depicts a nameless, adolescent girl who is battling the voices inside her head along with the powerful punishments at the hands of her inebriated mother. The key concerns of life and death are portrayed through the girl’s viewpoint as she compares her life with her sad, depressed mother. Anonymous as she is, the girl constantly makes an attempt to escape the outbursts, that come as a result to her mother’s drinking, by submerging herself into the water. An extended metaphor is used when expressing the girl as a machine and her will to continue surviving in her sombre life.

At the beginning of the novel, the motif of water is used to represent Sarah and Handful’s hope for freedom and unnoticeable, understated rebellions. The imagery of water is utilized to represent Sarah’s quiet defiance in her campaign for autonomy and fight to become a lawyer.

Bigotry and stubbornness are perceptible attitudes of small-town communities in 1960's Western Australia. The notion that the inhabitants of the tight-knit community of Corrigan are racist, prejudiced and ignorant is explicated in Craig Silvey's coming of age novel, Jasper Jones. The bildungsroman is narrated by Charlie Bucktin, an adolescent from the small town of Corrigan. Charlie becomes unexpectedly involved with a local indigenous boy, Jasper, as they set out to discover the truth about the death of a young girl from their community. Throughout this quest, Charlie comes to many realisations about life, ultimately, that society can be very cruel. The prejudism and ignorance of the tight-knit community of Corrigan manifests in the

In the work of African descended writers’, water is used as a common symbol. In Edwidge Danticat's Krik? Krak!, Jacques Roumain’s Masters of the Dew, and Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, tears, rivers, the sea and other forms of water are used to symbolize change. More specifically, it symbolizes the change between life and death; freedom and confinement. The three writers use water as an ironic symbol, representing life, liberty, and their contradictions.

Poetry, more than any other writing style, is filled to the brim with literary devices. These devices are used by the author to communicate their story. Mary Oliver’s, “Crossing the Swamp,” is a tale of one person’s struggles in crossing a swamp. Mary uses the techniques of descriptive language, metaphors, and personification to develop the relationship between the speaker and the swamp.

In this coming of age novel Lucy, by Jamaica Kincaid, a story is told of a young girl named Lucy as her life in America changes from what it was in the West Indies. Lucy struggles throughout the novel to find what exactly she desires. Drifting further and further from being similar to her mother. Lucy and her development throughout the novel are shown through her virginity, heterosexuality, and love as Kincaid forces questioning upon what is sexual normality. How one can feel trapped under sexual norms and feels lost.

Annie’s safe haven as a young child consists of baths to help heal her from bodily aches. In the Obeah culture, its believed that water can cure someone of any body aches. Annie informs the reader of her childhood when she bathes in the sea after church, “It was at a time when I was thought to have weak kidneys and a bathe in the sea had been recommended as a strengthening remedy” (Kincaid 42). Bathing in the water is a remedy for Annie’s body. The sea demonstrates a higher power since three quarters cover the earth's surface. Oceans are a natural force no mankind can replicate; therefore, they hold an influential component to heal Annie’s weak kidneys. Thus, allowing water to heal Annie from any bodily aches she has as a child.

In Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls,” there is a time line in a young girl’s life when she leaves childhood and its freedoms behind to become a woman. The story depicts hardships in which the protagonist and her younger brother, Laird, experience in order to find their own rite of passage. The main character, who is nameless, faces difficulties and implications on her way to womanhood because of gender stereotyping. Initially, she tries to prevent her initiation into womanhood by resisting her parent’s efforts to make her more “lady-like”. The story ends with the girl socially positioned and accepted as a girl, which she accepts with some unease.

In Crossing the Swamp, Mary Oliver exposes human nature to its simplest state; the passion for life present in the natural world transforms the individual by bringing one closer to the sublime. The spirituality teeming in Oliver’s swamp metaphorically represents hidden beauty within the mundane, as a call for shifted perspective and dignified appreciation permeates the passage.

Kincaid, Jamaica.“Girl”. In The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 541-542. Print.

Serving as an excellent source of healing Annie learns water also stimulates like a nurturing security. As a young child, Annie took unique baths that the local Obeah woman in the town advises her to take. Thus, Annie notes, “My mother and I often took a bath together... it was a special bath in which the barks and flowers of many different trees, together with all sorts of oils, were boiled in the same large caldron… We took these baths after my mother had consulted with her obeah woman” (14). Annie and her mother had special intimate moments in taking natural baths that had barks and flowers which symbolize the peace and comfort with nature. Since her mother valued the Obeah woman advice, the baths symbolized a unique ritual between mother and child. The water showcases the mother’s values that

The thoughts and emotions that occur in connection with water are triggered by the lake, and they help Ruth choose transience over any other form of existence. When water floods Fingerbone, the boundaries are overrun, exposing the impermanence of the physical world, and the world’s own natural push towards transience. Water shifts the margins, warning us that the visible world only shows us part of the whole--or perhaps even a mere reflection of a false reality. After the fantastic train wreck in which Ruth’s grandfather perished, the lake sealed itself over in ice, changing boundaries again, while it concealed, like a secret, the last traces of the victims with the illusion of its calm surface. The lake, a source of beauty and darkness, life and death, is “the accumulated past, which vanishes but does not vanish, which perishes and remains” (172). Water carries the symbolic possibility for rebirth– the flood causes the graves in the town cemetery to sink, “so that they looked a little like…empty bellies," suggesting that the dead were born into the receding waters (62). As water and death are so pre-eminent in Sylvie’s consciousness, in dream, she teaches Ruth to dance underwater, to live a life of transience to be

Nick is a World War I veteran who, as many veterans, suffers from emotional trauma that his experiences from the war left him with. Multiple scenes throughout the story, Big Two Hearted River, relates to Nick, the main character’s, journey toward recovery. Nick describes his surroundings in way that parallels to his own experiences and current voyage in respect to his revival.. He takes a calming adventure saturated with calming natural paths over hills, through woodland, and along a river to find peace with himself and to return to his prewar state of mind.

Annie’s safe haven as a young child consists of baths in the ocean to help heal her from bodily aches. In the Obeah culture, it is believed that water can cure someone of any body aches. Annie informs the reader of her childhood when she bathes in the sea after church, “It was at a time when I was thought to have weak kidneys and in the sea had been recommended as a strengthening remedy” (Kincaid 42). Annie values the Obeah traditions because her mother athing in the water is a remedy for Annie’s body. The sea demonstrates a higher power since three quarters cover the earth's surface. Oceans are a natural force no mankind can replicate; therefore, they hold an influential component to heal Annie’s weak kidneys. Thus, allowing water to heal Annie from any bodily aches she had as a child.

The world of Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” exists through the mostly unemotional eyes of the character Nick. Stemming from his reactions and the suppression of some of his feelings, the reader gets a sense of how Nick is living in a temporary escape from society and his troubles in life. Despite the disaster that befell the town of Seney, this tale remains one of an optimistic ideal because of the various themes of survival and the continuation of life. Although Seney itself is a wasteland, the pine plain and the campsite could easily be seen as an Eden, lush with life and ripe with the survival of nature.