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Innocence In Benedetto Palang's The High Tide

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In Benedetto Palang’s short metafictional story “The High Tide,” the narrator tells the story of a boy who wakes up and finds himself on some distant island. The lad, feeling lost, decides to explore his surroundings and get his bearings. This curious move ends up in him discovering 3 other islands, each is vastly different from one another. After arriving on the 1st isle, he discovers of the term “rebellion” which added a little smudge to the clean paper he kept. The learning these new concepts, along with more smudges on his paper, happen every time he finds out about the world around him. Eventually, this becomes too much for the boy, and he returns home to the first island he woke up in and “there he felt truly at peace.”(5) The numerous …show more content…

This is seen in the story when the boy mentioned “Why did I have to see this?” murmured the boy “It hurts having such ugly stains on me.” In the Genesis, Adam and Eve’s innocence is destroyed when they learn what good and evil is. Likewise, the effects of learning about the world tarnished the paper because knowledge, in this story, corrupts. Although not as clear as the other two; the author used the boy himself, as a symbol. This boy was written to portray the perfect image of innocence and purity just like the paper. From the boy’s awakening, we can see this as a representation of a newborn child knowing nothing about the world it is born into. However, as he grows up he learns more and more about it and finds that the world truly isn’t what it seems. “The High Tide” when read without contextual analysis yields a simple story of a boy’s adventure but when closely examined it so much more. The story’s use of symbols hides all these details inside trivial things such as the purpose of the 3 islands, the paper and the boy, himself. To conclude, these symbolisms represent the 3 recurring themes of the world and the loss of

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