How Anne Changes in Diary of a Young Girl

707 Words3 Pages
The classic book Diary Of a Young Girl is the haunting diary of Jewish teen Anne Frank, who hid from the Nazis for two years and whose promising talent was cut short by her death after she was captured by the Nazis in 1945 at the age of only fifteen. During her two years in the secret annex in which she hid with her family and another Jewish family, Anne changed and matured physically, psychologically, and emotionally from a friendly, but somewhat shallow child into a philosophical, mature young woman. Her changing thoughts and inner feelings reflect this change, propelling her into adulthood. Her diary is a window into her soul. Over the course of her two years in hiding, the “outer” and “inner” Anne, which were once one and the same, intertwine and differentiate until she forms a stoic outer shell to keep her increasingly dark, conflicted and self-aware thoughts secret. Though the book is a diary and does not have an intentional theme, one subconscious message it could send to the reader is that high stress environments make one change and mature faster. In the early entries, Anne describes herself as a smart, funny popular girl, but she is somewhat materialistic and in later entries goes so far as to describe her younger self as shallow. Many of her thoughts in the beginning parts of the book involve “Strings of boy friends, anxious to catch a glimpse of [her]” (3). The way Anne uses the word anxious in a lighthearted way shows that she is truly young, physically and at heart. The phrase “catch a glimpse” is an instance of eerie untintentional foreshadowing as the boys are trying to “catch a glimpse” of her, and later in the book she will be longing to “catch a glimpse” of the outside world. The different, more shallow use of the phrase shows that Anne is not mature yet and is more preoccupied with her social life than deep thought. As the book goes on, Anne

More about How Anne Changes in Diary of a Young Girl

Open Document