Growing Up Essay

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“Manhood” by John Wain focuses on the slightly negative sides of pacing, even though the father may not be doing what he does to put pressure on his son. “The Happiest Days of Your Life” written by Penelope Lively, is telling us how childhood actually can be. “Growing up” is represented in both stories, as a period in your life where other people affect you and adjust you into being who you are, and in that way making every single person unique. I chose to analyse and compare these two texts, because they deal with the theme “growing up” in quite similar ways. E.g. in “Manhood” we are introduced to a, for some people recognizable, type of parental influence, whereas we see a slightly more patriarchal, old-fashioned way of raising a kid in Penelope Lively’s “The Happiest Days of Your Life”. John Wain’s “Manhood” is bringing up the discussion of how far a father should go, into pacing his son. Some people might say, that the son will thank his father for what he does, but maybe Rob is just not that type of child. The sort of influence seen in “Manhood”, might even be seen as a natural part of “growing up”. In Lively’s story, we get to know that the child sits on the back seat of the car, next to a box of unopened chocolates and a folded comic. The folded comic is a metaphor telling us, that he is young and has not yet got through childhood. There is an expression saying: “Life is like a box of chocolates; You may never know what you get.” That phrase describes the child’s situation. He sits on the back seat of the car, full of anticipation, maybe he is a little nervous, because he does not know what is going to happen. He seems rather anxious about going to the preparatory school. Both stories are written by authors from England, and that is definitely reflected in the texts. Penelope Lively even went to boarding school at the age of twelve, and that certainly
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