Analysis Of Boys And Girls By Alice Munro

One awakening stage in a person’s life is the stage between being a child and being an adult. When an author writes about this stage it can be referred to as coming of age literature: literature that follows the growth of a person as he or she shifts from adolescence to young adulthood and discovers who he or she is while seeing the world around him or her differently. These coming of age narratives look at the time of a youth when he or she is influenced by his or her family, mentors, friends, peers, relationships, and community, all of which shape the youth into the person they will one day become. And, coming of age literature contain similar characteristics; such as, innocence of the world’s expectations, life that seems simple as a child but more complex the older one becomes, the disappointment of discovering life is not as black and white as one has perceived, tension between family members or peers, conflicts within oneself as understanding of the world changes, wisdom as one ages, and acceptance and realization that the adult world is complex and difficult. In the short story “Boys and Girls,” Alice Munro successfully explores the protagonist’s innocence of the world’s stereotypes, conflict between who she wants to be and who the world says she should be, and acceptance of the adult world as complex and difficult all of which reveal the main character’s struggles from adolescence to the realization she was no longer a child. At the beginning of the story, the