How Is Jim's Rights of Passage Experience Displayed in the Empire of the Sun?

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How does J.G. Ballard display Jim’s rites-of-passage experience in ‘Empire of the Sun’? In ‘Empire of the Sun’, the author, J.G. Ballard, very effectively describes, with great subtlety and skill, Jim’s transition from a young, innocent 11 year-old into a young man. This novel is well known for many things, but possibly the most well-noted is its rites-of-passage portrayal and throughout many phrases and paragraphs can be extracted that add to this. At the beginning of the book, it is clear that Jim has been well-protected from the outside world by his parents and knows fairly little of it, as any 11 year-old would. On the second page in Ballard writes: “like all children, Jim was intrigued by alcohol but vaguely disapproved of it,” the fact that Jim was ‘intrigued’ by alcohol exhibits that he was curious of it, it was something he had never really understood. This highlights his youthfulness and innocence. A page after this, it is clear he has great interest in childish things: “Yang enjoyed impressing his eleven-year-old passenger with tall tales of film stunts and trick effects.” Young children, generally, enjoy stories told with great exaggeration and ‘tall tales’ implies that these stories were only partly true, most likely exaggerated to please and ‘impress’ Jim. Another thing Jim enjoyed was making a model, “balsa-wood aircraft,” again, reinforcing this idea of youthfulness. Jim was from a privelidged background and he had clearly not been exposed to much of any other people’s lifestyles. His maid, Vera, attended to his every need, for example: “she buttoned his silk shirt,” a very simple thing to do and yet someone else does it for him. Soon after this, Vera reveals to him that her parents live together in only one room: “‘One room!,’ To Jim this was inconceivable,” his naivety embodies the protection he has had from any others’ lifestyles being from

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