Loss of Innocence

Darkness of other days

Bob shaw’s short stories are nothing but overlooked masterpieces of the past. These forgotten short stories are crafted extremely well and open a whole new dimension and aspect of thinking and analyzing short stories.

I came to this realization when reading the Light of other days, one of Bob shaw’s best short stories in my opinion. The story starts off with a couple looking around for a new house in the countryside. The eerie silence and mystique as they first enter the countryside represents their new venture into an ideal and quest unknown. As they view different homes, they eventually stumble upon what they believe is an extremely nice home made of a substance called slow glass.

The essence of slow glass is that light takes many years to pass through it, so constant moving images of the past flow across the walls, giving one a reminder, memory, or view of an action from a previous time. This amazing ability makes slow glass rare and allows one to capture the moments from his or her life, with the ability to once reminisce with them later on in life.

Now this encapsulated and breathtaking view of the house intrigues our characters to venture towards it and ask its owner about its sale. As they view the house and its aspects, they see its value and the different characteristics. Often times the protagonists in the story see the family members of the house owners wandering around, but are never noticed by them, causing a sense of uneasiness and questionability about the house. After various talks about budget and wandering around the house, our prospects leave the house and countryside intrigued about the house. They purchase some of the slow glass and then leave the house in a sense of uneasiness at the revelation they soon make.

Now this revelation is one that represents a loss of innocence of our main characters in a very impactful way. Our characters realize that the entire time they were seeing the house owner’s wife and son, they were actually just viewing images of them on the slow glass. The man’s family has been deceased for quite some time and is still present on the glass, but without him. This both represents the fact that the house’s owner was busy and didn’t get to spend time with his beloved family, and that he must live with that grief for the rest of the days they will remain on the glass. It is a constant reminder to himself about the time he didn't devote to his family, and now it’s too late.

The owner loses his innocence to his perception of love and being there for his family as he will regret not spending time with his family for the rest of his life. The glass represents a constant reminder of his loss, and causes the loss of innocence of any visitors. The main characters, or the buyer's, lose their innocence once they find the truth about the looking glass’s amazing sadness despite its uniqueness. They also lose their innocence to grief because they have never seen, dreaded, or been fooled by it’s false sense of time set by the looking glass. All of these different aspects combine to cause the loss of innocence of both the characters, as well as the reader’s perception of grief and the story.

And for the last time,

Special K <3

The Bet

Can we be the cause of our own loss of innocence? Theoretically yes because the amazing aspect of literature is that you can create and innovate anything you want to. Realistically, however, it would take a lot of action, change, and depth of insight in order to cause our own innocence. This idea can be seen applied in a very intuitive way in the short story “The Bet” which was masterfully written by Anton Chekhov.

A big theme that drives loss of innocence in “The Bet” is the theme of isolation. The experiment of solitary confinement is taken to extremes by the lawyer. The banker bets the lawyer to survive five years in solitary confinement and the lawyer, who is bet, raises his own bar to 15 years. Now thinking logically, the ideal situation in a bet is not to make your own task harder because the end goal is a reward. Why does the lawyer bet against himself making his task harder than before?

Putting this action in perspective, it is highly likely that the lawyer had some ulterior motive throughout this journey. His wanting to experience isolation drove him, essentially, to lose his own innocence for a few reasons.

As a lawyer in the real world at a party full of bankers and other professionals, there’s no doubt that he was at least significantly wealthy due to his position and that he had experienced different viewpoints in life; He had experienced the wealthy/living life to some extent.

His wanting to be alone can symbolize a journey to attain a greater understanding of life. We as humans strive to better ourselves both in private and the workplace, but can, at often times, be very stupid when it comes to making certain decisions. We care about our bodies, yet choose to smoke and hurt ourselves. We care about our planet, yet we continue to harm it through loitering and polluting.

It is fully possible that our lawyer here was finally done with the irrational and “stupid” decisionmaking made by humans. This is why he sought out to gain a better understanding of life.

But this all begs the question: why isolation?

Being isolated in this man’s case seemed to be pretty nice. He’s fed and given what he wants and needs, he is free to read or do any individual activity, and he puts himself through it in the first place.

At first, the lawyer seemed depressed, but soon he begins to study vigorously because there isn’t much else to do in solitary confinement alone.

He tackles languages and learns a few, moves on to religion and its aspects before finally viewing academic topics such as science, literature, and other random topics

The Lawyer ultimately comes out after 15 years wanting very minimal materialistic possession and a new outlook on life. Loss of innocence is, at its core, the changing of one’s ideology in terms of a drastic shift. The lawyer pushes himself to learn more about other areas of society to find his true ideals of enlightenment, much like Siddhartha's journey to find nirvana in “Siddhartha” by Hermann Hesse. This pushing of ideals and wanting to change, much like Siddhartha's quest, proves to us that one can be the cause of their own loss of innocence. If there’s a will, there’s a way, and the lawyer has utilized that to his best extent.

As we view the theme of loss of innocence over a larger variety of works in literature and other areas in the world, we see it’s appearance in many different forms. We’ve already established this ideal, which is why “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman provides us with a very unique outlet for these ideals. Now allow me to pose my main question about this story:

Is Jane Sane?

Other than the fact that my question rhymes, I strongly believe that Jane is not sane throughout the passage of the story mainly due to the point of view. As we read the story, we are able to narrow the point of view. The point of view is a first person narrative that Jane is telling the story in. “He said we came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest and all the air I could get.“(Gilman 1) This first person narrative point of view is crucial for the story and how we read it. Most of the time we are under the possibly false pretense that Jane is a sane women, but what if she isn’t? As we read the story, we forget that it is indeed Jane herself who is writing and narrating it.

Through the yellow wallpaper and her manifestation with it, we slowly see her lose her her sanity, but never once question the validity of every statement she makes. For all we readers know, she could be manipulating us throughout the story. Regardless we can’t be sure or fully satisfied with our faith in Jane and her possibly psychotic world.

Now that we’ve established that she is insane to an extent, we can change our whole outlook or viewpoint on this topic. What does this all mean for loss of innocence for, not the story’s characters, but we the readers?

The readers lose their innocence of their bias, because depending on which angle one read the book from, one’s view on the intensity of Jane’s sanity changes. If you came into the story following Jane and believing her story like many of us did, you are in the innate bias of supporting her as the protagonist in the story. Most people will brush this off and continue on with their lives not comprehending more than her general conflict. But when you introduce this viewpoint and re-read the story, you realize that you may have been fooled the entire time. You lose your innocence and naivete to the underlying fact of the matter: Jane was the one directing her story and could have shaped it in any way she wanted.

If we have evidence that she did go insane with the yellow wallpaper near the end of the story, we can assume on those grounds that she wasn’t perfectly sane. And if she wasn’t perfectly sane, how can we validate any way she set up or explains parts of her story or her life.

And if that is the case, do John and the house or the wallpaper exist? Or are they just a figment of the white wall of the asylum jane is trapped in.

To next time,

Special K

We spend our partitioned lives, and a brevity of them, in AP Literature finding new ideas to talk about and expand upon. We look into the depths and far-reaching ends of these characters and analyze our different themes till there is no more to discuss about.

But what does that mean, in terms of our themes, for us?

As loss of innocence was my group's assigned theme, we strove to find the various places where our characters lost their naiveté or innocence. We established points where the monster lost its innocence in various places like the point of his creation, when he was shunned by an innocent family, and when he was shot for trying to save a drowning woman's life. We talked about Victor's innocence and how he loses it at the deaths of everyone in his life as well as his decision to abort his second.

But what about us? Where do we as readers lose our innocence?

A loss of innocence, by the common agreement in our fishbowls and online discussions, is when a character loses his or her naiveté. For example, a parent buys a child a pet goldfish and the child believes he and the fish will live happily ever after forever. He loses his innocence when the fish passes away and he realizes that both happiness and life have a definite end sometimes. Regardless, this is just a life lesson and he will pick up his life soon after, but the point is that he went through that hardship and it may stand to define him as a person.

Now that we've established that, where do we truly lose our innocence when we read the novel?

There are various small points where us readers lose our innocence and then there is one big point where we lose it as well. When Victor mocks his creation after it is created, we discussed about how we felt bad and didn't think it was right. But that all changed as soon as the monster kills an innocent human life. We lose innocence at the mere idea of the monster being a tabula rasa because it went against a fundamental human ideal, the preservation of life. When we feel bad for the monster's stories, yet mock it for blackmailing Victor, we go against our word and lose our innocence of opinion. These are all very minute instances of where us readers lose our innocence, but even this is a stretch.

The main point where we readers lose our innocence is when we find the monster, near the end of the book, weeping beside Victor's dead body. It's primary mission was to blackmail, threaten, and kill victor, but it weeps at the death of its enemy? We lose our innocence the most here simply because we realize the monster is capable of feeling empathy for the death of its creator. Countless time it murdered people and it was not apparent to us whether or not the monster felt, but our emotions are crossed and we lose our innocence of judging. We were wrong about the monster caring for its creator regardless of their relationship, and it turned out to be very different from what we actually expected.

We judged a book by its very strange and limited cover.

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Special K

As in our fishbowls. we often discussed the very important factor of time. "When did he go to college, When did he die, When did he create the monster." These events all have factual evidence and can be pinpointed to a certain location, but when does the monster truly lose his innocence? We've had entire fishbowl discussions about the main point where the monster loses its innocence, and for that matter many points where it loses its innocence. That's where we get to the real discourse about this topic; when does the monster first lose its innocence and which loss is the most important? Let's analyze these 2 questions separately.

First off, when does the monster first lose its innocence?

I believe this pivotal moment in the monster's life is when he is first created. As victor flees from the sight of his creation and comes back, he continues to call the monster ugly, which definitely impacted the monster as it was one of its first interactions with the world. Victor can be quoted,

"I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then, but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived" (Shelley pg43).

This instance of pure hatred and pity sparked a sadness within the monster that can be traced as the first official loss of the monster's innocence, right after its creation. Regardless of this first instant, the monster still has hope that others will not be like Victor and will eventually accept him for who he is. Or will they?

Now let's address the second part of our question at hand; Which loss of innocence is the most important?

Of all the times where we consider it a loss of innocence, from the time the monster first killed to when he was shot for trying to save a drowning girl, I came down to 1 main point that can be highly debated about its importance. As the monster adjusts his way of living and learns from an innocent family in a cottage, he uses a literal understanding of "Lost Paradise" as hope for his acceptance. He understands the delicacies of life and learns from the behaviors of the children and the blind man. As he is accepted by the blind man on the level of his wit, everything changes when the children face him. These innocent creatures the monster was studying suddenly screamed and ran for their lives. And this was all in terms of sheer pain and fear from the ugliness of our monster. 

The fact that the monster spent all that time trying to learn and integrate himself into society serves to explain the depth of his heartbreak when he is rejected. When the simple blind man speaks to the monster, he is not in any form of fear and accepts the intellect of the monster, but when the girls see his disfigured figure, they are extremely frightened. It's a fear that eventually drives the monster to make very rash decisions in terms of his surroundings. 

Do you guys think there's a more important loss of innocence? If so just comment or message me on facebook, twitter, snapchat, or instagram!

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Special K 

Why do we do what we do when we don't understand something? We always strive for perfection and try to comprehend what we want to learn, but what do we do when we can't understand how something works?

We do the opposite.

Doing the opposite of something you are trying to learn opens your mind up to new possibilities never even touched upon before. When we use these tactics and strategies to solve problems, we are able to gain a fuller understaning of how things work. In Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, the main character, Victor Frankenstein, is obsessed by the concept of life and its depth. He works endlessly, fulfilling his creative thirst, and cracks the code to create what he later calls a monster. Although Victor cracks the code of life, he is left scarred and dead on the inside, causing the death of 2 people he knew. Victor is scared at his knowledge and understanding of life, but can not fathom the mere tip of death itself. The opposite can't be understood because he's scared by just the aspect of it. This loss of innocence on the pursuit for life changes Victor as a character by dispelling his sincere naivete towards the situation.

In calculus we have this concept of a derivative, the rate at which something changes at a cartain point. Many people are challenged by it because they don't focus on it's opposite, the integral, the same way. Understanding of the opposite side of a point allows for mastery of something one was once confused about. These ideas help us progress as a society and fill in any gaps along the path of our problems.

The monster in Frankenstein also transverses through a similar dilemma. He is called ugly by his creator, who flies away from his creation and leaves it abandoned. The monster has nothing to do but to try to opposite, from being rather calm and shy to becoming violent and analytical. This idea of engaging the opposite due to either a lack of understanding of something or to, on the flipside, master and learn a concept can be seen as debateable from 2 vastly different perspectives.

Now that we're understood this possible idea I have proposed, what's the opposite of this title?

Loss of Innocence.

- Special K