Coming of age narratives do not necessarily depict complete struggles, or complete journeys to maturity. Some narratives of coming of age depict a protagonist that reaches maturity only through a great struggle. Other comings of age stories depict a central character that strives to create a new and different form of identity but fails miserably in the process. The best forms of such stories, however, take the reader by surprise. "Where are you going, Where have you been?" By Joyce Carol Oates begins as a comedy, but ends as a tragedy. "The Man Who was Almost a Man," by Richard Wright begins in a tragic vein, but ends as a funny tale of triumph.
Joyce Carol Oates' young, female protagonist Connie is an apparently sassy young woman, beautiful and brimming with life and confidence in her budding sexuality. In contrast to her older sister, Connie is expressive and animated. She seems full of promise and defiance. However, her sexuality is really put forward and prominent before she is mature enough to use it in an intelligent fashion. Really, Connie is quite innocent, and her dreams about boys at night are vague. She is victimized by Arnold Friend because her assumed, projected identity of an adult young woman with concrete and physical sexual desires is not the real...
Like Connie, he is forced to become someone before his time of maturity that he is not -- namely a hired laborer. He attempts to put on the persona of an older male, toting a gun, to free himself of the oppression of society and the stigmatization of becoming a Black man when he grows up. But unlike Connie, Wright's young oppressed adolescent finds a different way of creating his adult identity. After losing his wages because of a misfired gun, the young man experiences a revelation and skips town on a train, finding freedom from the narrow constraints of identity, of brutality or servility, imposed upon him by the society around him.
In contrast to both these tales, the language of John Gardner's "Redemption" is not that of questioning identity, but that of religion. Rather than putting the seminal act that changes everything at the end of the tale, and beginning the tale with a titular question, at the beginning we learn the young man has killed his brother by accident -- the story…
