Closing Thoughts on the Closing Pages
On the second-to-last page of Sag Harbor , Benjy makes a comment about how much more his 15-and-three-quarters-year old self knows than his 15-and-a-half-year old self. He's acknowledging that over the summer, he's experienced tremendous growth. He compares it to how a 15-year-old would see their 8-year old self as just a child, or how the one year gap between 14 and 15 can mean so much. This part reminded me of the conversations that we had earlier in the year (and have continued to have) about what a "coming of age" experience means to each of us, and what elements of it can be accurately communicated in a novel. One of the main points that I remember is that coming of age is a gradual process, but it is condensed quite a bit when writing a story about it. But I think that summer is different in that way--for most of the year, students are kept in school, where little self-discovery is made. Summers allow us freedom, time to be ourselves, time to engage with frien