Loss of Innocence

International Baccalaureate World Literature

McKeon

Ashley McKeon

Mr. Wallace

IB English 11

15 January 2009

Loss of Innocence

Every person in his or her youth can be said to be innocent and pure, but, in time, through the experiences and relationships that one has, this innocence ebbs away. The experiences and lessons that are learned in life’s journey stay with the person and help to shape who the person will grow up to be in the future. In the play “Master Harold”…and the boys (MHB) by Athol Fugard and in the novel All the Pretty Horses (ATPH) by Cormac McCarthy, loss of innocence plays a key role in developing and molding the main characters. Although the places in which these stories are set are vastly different, they both present many difficulties and hardships in the maturation of both characters. Hally, the young white boy in MHB, grows up in the harsh setting of South Africa during the early stages of Apartheid, while John Grady grows up in Texas and later journeys to the unforgiving plains of Mexico. In this paper, the loss of innocence in John Grady and Hally will be discussed by comparing and contrasting their three stages of maturity; beginning innocence, facing harsh realities, and learning from experience.

In the beginning of both MHB and ATPH, the authors characterize the main characters as innocent and naïve. Both Hally and John Grady are portrayed as young teenage boys who will soon be coming-of-age. In the beginning of the play MHB, Hally arrives at his mother’s tearoom in Port Angeles and speaks cheerfully saying, “How’s it, chaps?”(9) to his good friends Sam and Willie who are black servants in their forties that work for his mother. In South African Apartheid society, associating oneself with people of colored skin was looked harshly down upon but, Hally defies these rules by having a relationship with these men, thus displaying a childlike innocence of racial discrimination. As the play unfolds, readers learn more of Hally, Sam, and Willie’s great friendship. While speaking with them, Hally recalls that in his childhood he spent a lot of fun times with the two. He says, “I think I spent more time in there with you chaps than anywhere else.”(25) In his innocence, Hally seems to believe that he can go on in life just being friends with Sam and Willie without having any sort of effects on his own life. This innocence can be compared to that found in ATPH in that, John Grady and his friend Lacey Rawlins have a romanticized childlike idea that they can go out on a journey to the unfamiliar country of Mexico on horseback in the year 1950 and live the lives of cowboys or desperados just as in the days of the wild wild west. They picture that Mexico will be a country with “lakes and runnin water and grass to the stirrups.”(55) And later the two again show their innocence when Rawlins says, “Where do you reckon that paradise is at all?”(59) By imagining that Mexico will be a ‘paradise’ on earth that they can escape to, the two boys reveal to readers their innocent dispositions because they have childish fantasies of what a foreign land will be like. Because John Grady and Rawlins are so young and naive, they make their decision to travel to Mexico out of wild childhood imaginations and with a lack of judgment. The lack of maturity in both of these situations depicts how much innocence both John Grady and Hally still have at this point in the stories.

This is a preview of the whole essay

As both the play and the novel progress, the characters have to confront harsh realities of life that they may not have dealt with before. On his journey, John Grady goes through specific experiences that impact his maturity as opposed to Hally who actually says and does things that show he is losing his childhood innocence. In ATPH, John Grady and Rawlins meet and travel with a young boy named Jimmy Blevins. But later in the story Blevins is shot and killed by the Mexican police without given a fair trial. John Grady is appalled and he cannot understand how this unjust and cruel violence could happen. He later speaks to the captain of the police saying, “You didn’t have to kill him…You could of just brought him back to the truck.”(180) By having to deal with the loss of Blevins due to an unfair justice system, John Grady is has to face the bitter reality that the world can indeed be a violent, brutal place. Later, John Grady and Rawlins are arrested and forced to go to prison; a place filled with “depravity” and “violence” and where “every man was judged by a single standard and that was his readiness to kill.”(182) In this unforgiving environment, John Grady is attacked by the vicious ‘cuchillero’ and ends up having to defend himself by killing the attacker. Within these harsh walls of prison life, John Grady loses whatever childhood innocence he has left. With the blood of another man now on his hands, he will have to deal with guilt and shame for the rest of his life. These experiences are crucial to his loss of innocence and now he will forever face the consequences of his decision to come to Mexico. In contrast with John Grady’s rough direct experiences, Hally’s loss of innocence is revealed mainly through his dialogue and actions. As the play progresses Hally becomes angry because he learns that his alcoholic father is returning home from the hospital. He then turns his anger toward his father into rage against his friends Sam and Willie for trying to stop him from ridiculing his father. Hally tells them, “My mother is right. She’s always warning me about allowing you to get too familiar. Well this time you’ve gone too far...You’re only a servant here and don’t you forget it.”(53) By degrading his best friends and telling them that the only thing they are to him are lowly servants, Hally shows a change in his character. His innocent boyhood demeanor has developed into the demeanor of a white person in the confines of racial prejudice. Hally later resorts to using cruel racist remarks and insults to try and control his situation. By using racial discrimination to lash out in anger, Hally shows that he has changed from a boy who ignored racism in his life to one who conformed to it.

As the two characters mature, they eventually have to come to realizations about what they have encountered and they have to learn something from the things that they have done. In MHB, Hally has to deal with feelings of shame and guilt for having insulted two of his best friends out of anger. In the end of the play, Sam leaves Hally with a thought. He says, “You know what that bench means now,” (referring to a whites only bench representing racial discrimination), “and you can leave it any time you choose. All you have to do is get up and walk away.”(60) Sam is telling Hally that although many hurtful things were said between them, he still has the chance to reject the hateful discrimination of South African society and, in a sense, regain his childhood innocence. But Hally is left “helpless” and says “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”(59) The author leaves him in the end with a choice to either learn from his mistakes or conform to the evils of racism. In ATPH, John Grady also comes to a harsh realization about life. He falls completely in love with a Mexican girl by the name of Alejandra. But, Alejandra’s aunt forbids their relationship and John Grady cannot do anything about it. Thus he is left to go on without the love of his life. The author writes about this moment saying, “He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led nowhere at all.”(254) He comes to the sad realization that love cannot always exist freely in the world. From his other tough experiences in Mexico, John Grady is left to deal with agonizing guilt for killing a man as well as the memory of Blevins getting shot unjustly and the fact that he did nothing about it. He realizes that he indeed has been changed by his experiences; so much so that when he goes back home to Texas he says, “It ain’t my country.”(299) And rides out on horseback, leaving his hometown behind.

As both the play and the novel close, readers can see that John Grady and Hally are no longer the naïve boys described in the beginning of the stories. In their innocence, neither knew what they were capable of doing. However, as the stories progress, Hally and John Grady come face to face with real life issues that often signal the passage from sincere innocence to harsh reality, a reality laced with discrimination, heartbreak, injustice, and death.

1496 words