Islands As A Narration Of A Young

Boys Initiation Into The World Essay, Research Paper

A. 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

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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. He cries himself to sleep. When he awakens,

he has arrived at Mljet, and is exposed to the Island, and what it contains, including

adult fairy tales, in the form of scary stories.

Upon the island, away from everything familiar to him, the boy is laid bare to not

only the reality of a harsh, thicket covered island, but also his Uncle Julius, who seems

to enjoy telling the young boy scary stories of the island. The first story Uncle Julius

tells the boy is about some crazed mongooses that were brought on to the island to get

rid of the snakes. The snakes were killing chicken and dogs, but then the mongooses

killed all the snakes and began to kill the chicken and dogs themselves. Uncle Julius tells

the boy that it s all one pest after another, like revolutions. Life is nothing if not a

succession of evils. (131) This story shows the boy how even supposedley good

things can turn bad . People who were once childhood friends to the boy may later

become his enemies and of this he must be cautioned.

The second story told to the boy is about Uncle Julius s grandfather. His family

brought beekeeping to the Bosnia, and were respected. The story ends with his

grandfather dying of dysentry. People used to die of that all the time. They d just shit

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themselves to death. (133) This harsh realization that even respected, intelligent

people can die in undignified ways is another step into the adult world. As a child, the

boy feels like everyone lives forever, but as he is initiated into the adult world, he

realizes how life is not endless and in the end, we all end up the same; dead and

un-protected from anything that makes us anything more than any other dying

animal.

Uncle Julius next tells the boy a story of the Arkangelsk camp, where if you

were repeatedly late or missed several days of school with no excuse, you would get six

months to three years in a camp. (134) Uncle Julius continues the story about a boy

called Vanyka who was sent to one of these camps and tortured and moved from camp

to camp, until one day he escaped and killed another escapee, so he would have food.

This story of cannibalism intigues the boy and he shows his interest in the adult world

with the question, So what happened to him? (136) With

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