Comparing Adulthood In The Joy Luck Club And The Glass Castle

Aging is a phenomena not only of the body, but of the mind as well. It is situational in practice, giving each journey into adulthood its own “thumbprint”. One’s trials and tribulations gain emotional weight as they are encountered, but the weight one holds at certain periods of time can differ according to their background. The novels Flight, The Joy Luck Club, and The Glass Castle; however, enlighten the possibility of resembling another’s venture into maturity, despite distinct differences in general conditions. Together, these three novels endeavor into their protagonists’ personalities, and they thematically portray coming-of-age transformation. First, in the novel Flight, Sherman Alexie depicts the physical, mental, and emotional growth of the protagonist, a vengeful adolescent named Zits. Zits’s

Based on her unconventional upbringing and the dissimilarity of her immediate family, Walls narrates the novel largely in chronological order, creating a layout of the exact moments that she became of age. At age three, Walls claims “‘Mom says I’m mature for my age…’” (Walls, ). Walls’s mother considers her “adult” enough to be responsible for her own meals, implanting a sense of maturity and deporting an aspect of immaturity from Jeanette's understanding. Parental interference with Jeannette’s “inner age” is also compounded upon by her father, Rex. Rex overestimates his daughter's growth repeatedly, saying “It was like that time I threw you into the sulfur spring to teach you to swim,...You might have been convinced you were going to drown, but I knew you’d do just fine.” (Walls, 213). Rex intends to intensify Jeanette’s collective age with rapidity. Both of Walls’s parent’s intentions and personalities elevated the mental age of their children, forcing them to come-of-age to accommodate their