Islands as a narration of a yo
Islands as a narration of a yoA. Hemon�s Islands is the narrative of a young boys initiation into the adult
world. The boy travels to a place he has never been before, far away from all the
comforts of his childhood home. The island is full of secrets about the �adult world� and
the terrible things that can happen within it. While away, he learns shocking lessons
about the world in which he lives, mainly from his Uncle Julius, who tells scary stories
that he thinks the boy should know about. The boy is unprotected from everything on
the island and everything it contains. Through this unprotected environment, he learns
things about the adult world that are not learned anywhere else.
In the car on the way to the coast, the boy almost loses his voice by singing
�communist songs the entire journey.� (129) By his singing songs about �mournful
mothers looking through graves for their dead sons� and �the revolution� the boy
demonstrates his naivity. He is, after all, just a young boy. His limited life experience is
shown in his singing such songs, without understanding the full meanings and
connotations that those songs carry. The boys� innocence is emphasized here, as these
are �adult� songs and it is only, generally, children who sing on car journeys until their
voices are gone.
Even before boarding the boat, the boy begins to notice how ugly age and
adulthood can be. He notices the �gnarled knees , the spreading sweat stains on their
shirts and sagging wrinkles of fat on their thighs.� (129) At one point, he sees �one of
the Germans, an old, bony man� get down on his knees and then vomit over the pier
edge. The boy sees this, but still relates it back to something he understands. �The vomit
Catherine Henderson
hit the surface and then dispersed in different directions, like children running away to
hide from the seeker.� (130) Again, by relating something so grotesque to something so
childlike and innocent, the boy reminds the reader that he is still just a young child, not
yet ready to deal with this kind of adult vision.
Once boarded on the boat and sailing to Mljet, the boy loses his hat. It is not just
a hat though, it is his hat that shielded him from the grown-ups and the adult way of
life. If he wanted to look at them properly, he had to raise his head. The hat was a
�round straw hat with all the seven dwarfs painted on it.� (129) When the gust of
waylaying wind snatches the hat off the boys head and tosses it into the sea, the boy is
no longer shielded by childrens fairy tales of princesses and dwarfs, and is symbolically
no longer protected from the adult world....
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