Romeo’s Long Way Down Coming of age is a huge thing when it comes to kids going through life. Coming of age is the idea of kids growing up to become adults and what happens/what they do along the way. Two coming of age groups that Will (A Long Way Down) and Romeo (Romeo and Juliet) go through are experiencing loss and perception of parents. Juliet experiences loss when Romeo killed himself because he thought that she was dead, Will experienced a change in the perception of his parents because he finally saw his dad after so many years. The first component is Will from the story A Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds. The component that Will shows is a change in the perception of his parents. Will’s perception changed a lot over the course of the …show more content…
Because he was about three years old when this happened, he never really got to grow up with a dad so when he finally met him and he put a gun to his head it changed Wills perspective on him for the worse. Another quote to support this is, “I screamed, pushed him away, yelled until my throat stripped, until my words sizzled. Weak. Weak. Weak. Wet. Wet. Wet. Worried about looking like a punk-ass kid” (Reynolds 232). This quote proves that Will was confused, terrified and a little heartbroken by his dad pulling a gun to his head. In conclusion, this brought Will through a change in the perception of his dad and went through fatherhood for the worse. The second component through coming of age is loss. Loss is a very important part of growing up. It can teach children to experience grief and be able to learn and grow from it. In the story Romeo and Juliet, Romeo experiences loss a few times with Mercutio and then eventually Juliet. Before the loss, Romeo was a loyal Montague and lived his own peaceful life. Then a girl named Roslyn came along, he went to a party with the original intent to see Roslyn there but ended up meeting Juliet and falling in love. This caused his best friend Mercutio to die which he griefed very hard over, this taught him to handle loss a little better then before showing