Blog Entry #1: The Cruel Push into Reality

Innocence. Waking up at the brink of dawn to watch cartoons, completely unaware that two planes crashed into New York City. Writing a Christmas list, hoping that Santa will consider you to be a good child and deliver the present you’ve been dying to have for weeks. Hiding away from the cooties your female friend has while at the arts and crafts table. To me, being innocent is about being a naïve, imaginative child, not necessarily losing one’s self-purity.

However, Alice Sebold’s take of the idea of innocence is different compared to mine in her book, Lucky. After reading a few pages, I was taken aback at the description of Alice’s rape, putting particular emphasis on how she was a virgin and how the rapist doesn’t believe her, forcing her to take off her clothes and to perform oral sex “like sucking a straw” (19). The results are terrifying, leaving her scared, isolated, and vulnerable in ways many haven’t experience. The idea of innocence, here, is represented.

Today, many people consider ones virginity a symbol of purity or cleanliness, and although some people don’t consider losing it to be an issue, imagine what it’s like to be forced to give that sense of purity and cleanliness away. Being pinned to the ground, Alice had to endure giving up her virginity against her will, being pushed face first into the dark, cruel part of the world, that rape, murder, and war exist. So, in a way, Alice not only looses her innocence in the way that a child is exposed to the harsher elements of the world, but in the sense that a symbolic representation of it was stolen from her.

If only children didn’t wish that they’d grow up sooner; they should cherish every possible moment of naivety as possible. They don’t know what they’re going to miss