Compare And Contrast The Found Boat And The Jimi Hendrix Experience

The Found Boat and The Jimi Hendrix Experience Essay

The Found Boat by Alice Munro and The Jimi Hendrix Experience by Guy Vanderhaeghe are stories about the coming of age of the main characters—Eva and Troy respectively. Both step into their adolescence accompanied by a group of teens of their age and make significant discoveries about their life. At the beginning of the stories, Eva and Troy both have an immature attitude. Eva learns and matures by following and conforming to her group’s activities while Troy undergoes an internal struggle between his friends and the old man’s opinions. In both stories, the main characters realize that they have crossed the boundary of innocence but they react in opposite ways. Therefore, the authors say that

At the beginning of the stories, Eva and Troy have an immature attitude and both eventually find themselves in a transitional situation of unknown and absence of authority. In The Found Boat, Eva behaves immaturely with the group of boys from her school for no particular reason. Although they see the boys teasing them, “Eva and Carol… [have] not spoken to them or looked at them or, even yet, given any sign of knowing they [are] there” (Munro 366). This separation of boys and girls into two distinct groups indicate that they don’t have the maturity to get along with each other. Eva’s childishness is also reflected through her attempt to trick the boys. In fact, Carol and she tell the boys that they have found a boat while the boys “don’t understand that they [have] been fooled” (Munro 367). So, the two groups of opposite

Eva tries, in vain, to find her innocence by falling back from her experiences while Troy abandons his initial ideal and moves forward. In The Found Boat, Eva reaches a pivot point when she, naked, meets Clayton in the river. Clayton’s squirt of water hits Eva’s both breasts and she “[crouches] down and [slides] into the water, letting her head go right under” (Munro 370). She realizes the shame and vulnerability of her nakedness and tries right away as a reflex to return to her initial state of opposition with the boys. Eva asserts: “’I hate them anyways’” (Munro 370); however, she cannot forget this experience and recover her innocence and ends up with Carol “grabbing themselves as if they [have] the worst pain” (Munro 370). This scene implies that once the innocence of childhood is lost, there is no return due to the acquired lucidity and results in pain. In Jimi Hendrix Experience, Troy also crosses a moral boundary by stealing a bike with his friends (Vanderhaeghe 314). Even though he has made troublesome pranks in the past, it is the first time he does an illegal act of stealing. At the end of the story, Troy also realizes the danger of his choices of friends and actions by seeing the “broken spikes, the twisted wheel rims” (Vanderhaeghe 320) that remain of their stolen bikes and by the eventual news (after two