More handpicked essays just for you.
Peer pressure in youth culture
Effects of peer pressure amongst the youths
Effects of peer pressure on the youths
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Long Hard Road of Adolescence
Reading through the novel, Go Ask Alice, finding out all of the unbelievable, yet true, experiences and feelings of Alice is quite shocking. No matter how shocking they may seem, you can very easily relate those experiences and feelings to those of a typical day-in and day-out teenager. Those characteristics being loneliness, a generation gap, and defiance.
At the beginning of the novel, Alice finds herself to be very lonely. As like other teenagers, she goes through many emotional states that may lead to “dieting”, starving oneself, or binge eating. There are also finding such things as getting into school or club activities, possibly getting a job. Those few things would be the most reasonable approaches to resolving the problem and will keep teens from thinking lonely and depressing thoughts. Although what is unfortunate is that Alice, along with a lot of other teenagers, turn to drugs and alcohol as an escape. Once they start doing the drugs, the drugs replace those bad feelings.
The generation gap is another good characteristic seen in the novel. When Alice and her family moved, she started to change her appearance in ways her parents didn’t like and they were also worried because of this change in Alice. She starts to dress like a hippie, wearing moccasins and clothes with fringe. She also starts to iron her hair flat instead of wearing it with a flip. With her parents nagging at her about her change in appearance made her want to breakdown. All the feelings bottle up inside of Alice, which leads to more drug use. The situation that Alice went through is a typical situation between any other teenager and their parents.
Many times throughout the novel, Alice pretty much does what she wants, when she wants no matter what. Such as when Chris and Alice go to San Francisco. They are in total control of themselves, Alice never likes when her parents try and tell her something. A lot like teenagers today go against their parents will. Alice was always welcomed home whenever she wanted to go back.
Go Ask Alice is the diary of a young 15 year old drug abuser. At the beginning of the book, "Alice" is a typical, insecure, middle class teenager that only thinks with boys, diets, and popularity. She never taught of getting into drugs. This girl had a lot of self esteem, and was very happy. Her life changes for the worse when her family moves to a new town and she finds herself less popular and more isolated than ever before. That is why she buys this diary to express herself with personal taughts. She becomes unhappy in the new town, she is overjoyed to be allowed to return to the old town to spend the summer with her grandparents. During this stay she is invited to a party by an old acquaintance; there she unwittingly ingests LSD that had been added to random bottles of Coca Cola and distributed to the party guests as a game. The other guests had mistakenly assumed Alice was aware of what the "game" entailed. After this, she seeks drugs deliberately, and rapidly proceeds to marijuana, amphetamines, and casual sex. A pregnancy scare and the return to her new town encourage her to turn away from drugs; however she soon falls in with the drug crowd where finally she finds acceptance. She starts dating a drug dealer and sells drugs to grade-schoolers for him. After realizing he was using her, she turns him in to the police and runs away from home with her new friend Chris, moving to San Francisco. After being given heroin and then being raped by Chris' boss, Shelia and her boyfriend, she and Chris return home.
This anonymous girl is a normal fifteen year old teenager who just wants to be popular and fit in. In this book, she goes through many different so-called friends, or people who she thinks she likes. Many of her friends at first, were just plain ordinary kind of dorky kids and she wanted something new. She discovered a new crowd who she thought she could be popular with, but they only lead her to make the wrong decisions and to ditch the good friends that she had before. They brought her into the seductive world of drugs. She kept all of her secrets in her diary and she never thought to tell anyone. Not only did she hide it from her good friends, but also she hid it from her parents, who...
wither in their pride/ Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride.” From
Thus, Alice in Wonderland is a good illustration of a Hero’s Journey. This story allows us to see how Alice overcomes the three main phases, and most of the stages identified by Campbell in her journey-transformation from an undisciplined child to a wise young adult. Throughout the story, Alice overcomes the nonsense of the young and the old before she truly understands what adulthood is all about. All through her adventures in Wonderland, she encounters numerous new situations and meets different archetypes that are necessary for her to be considered a Hero.
Her eventual attentiveness could be borne from her polite nature and want of companionship, as well as from the persona of the Red Queen. The Queen represents a governess or teacher-type and thus Alice learns to listen, even when she does not fully want to. Whenever Alice is afraid she has offended someone, she tries her best to remedy the situation. “Alice curtseyed again, as she was afraid from the Queen’s tone that she was a little offended: and they walked on in silence till they got to the top of the hill” (Caroll). Alice gives of a persona of being well-trained, yet still childish and demanding. However, as she moves further through Wonderland she begins to gain more control of her childish impulses, such as being angry with the world for ‘making things difficult’ for her when she could not find her way through a maze. In this way, Alice is a dynamic character. She matures throughout the story as she finds out more about
When she first is confronted by the problem or race it hits her with a thump. Bob takes Alice to dinner where she states, “I don’t want feel like being refused” (55). Alice does what she can to avoid the face of racism. She lacks the integration within the different community, which gives her a one-path perspective. While going to the restaurant with Bob, he asks, “Scared because you haven’t got the white folks to cover you” (55)? She doesn’t have the protection of her friends or her parents to shy away from the truth of her being African American. She is hiding behind a mask because she’s passing as white. She’s accepting the assumption that she belongs to their culture. When she goes out, “with white folks the people think you’re white” (60). But, when she goes out with Bob there is nothing to hide behind. She’s confronted with the truth. Already feeling low about the restaurant, and getting pulled over by the cops, she uses her wealth to get out of the situation. She says, “I am a supervisor in the Los Angeles Welfare” (63). The power of her family shows that she be treated better by the cops and others in the
P.C Smith felt the wind as the thing came flying past him then a large
The Catcher in the Rye is not all horror of this sort. There is a wry humor in this sixteen-year-old's trying to live up to his height, to drink with men, to understand mature sex and why he is still a virgin at his age. His affection for children is spontaneous and delightful. There are few little girls in modern fiction as charming and lovable as his little sister, Phoebe. Altogether this is a book to be read thoughtfully and more than once. It is about an unusually sensitive and intelligent boy; but, then, are not all boys unusual and worthy of understanding? If they are bewildered at the complexity of modern life, unsure of themselves, shocked by the spectacle of perversity and evil around them - are not adults equally shocked by the knowledge that even children cannot escape this contact and awareness?
A major conflict is focusing on after Alice’s brain operation, she perceives to everyone and herself she’s the same girl she used to be. Unfortunately, her friends and family don’t agree that she is the same person. “You’re always saying that you are still you because you have the same brain, but who is to say that your whole personality is in your head?” (pg.5) Jenny argues that Alice is a completely different person than who she used to be. Their mother stands up for Alice but secretly does not agree with her, she does not see Alice as the daughter she used to have. “Sometimes I think my sister is dead.” (pg.5) This similar quote is showing how powerful Jenny feels about the new Alice and her failure to see how Alice is truly seeking self reflection. “Alice stared at her mother, but again her mother avoided her eyes.” (pg.5) This final quote impacts the reader 's empathetically and Alice immeasurably knowing that her own mother doesn’t accept her for who she is now. These quotes show the frustration from Alice and her family, skillfully building apprehensive conflict in the rising
In the end there are many situations where Alice feels that she is different from everyone else around her. Alice realized that she was always different but more so when she was with these three characters who are the Mad Hatter, the caterpillar and the pigeon, and lastly being the Queen of Hearts. When she met the Mad Hatter is more so when she started to realize that she was different from everyone else in Wonderland. Throughout the book Alice just kept finding out how different she really was. Then she met the caterpillar and the pigeon who both made her question who and what she is. Then lastly she met the Queen of Hearts and really found out how different she was from everyone that was surrounding her in Wonderland. To conclude these were just a few examples where Alice felt like she was different from everyone else.
The Victorian Age was the time period named after England’s Queen Victoria, who ruled from 1837 to 1901. Her attitude was a severely dull and strict one, which rapidly spread over the rest of Britain. The British were afraid to talk about anything close to being unsuitable, and they treasured childhood as a time where there were no worries or responsibilities. Although the youthful period was valued, children were better left to be seen, and not heard. They were encouraged to grow up as fast as possible and taught to mind their manners with extremely strict discipline.Besides the obvious, the way and language Alice was written in, Victorian culture appears in almost every turn of the page. Alice is shaped because of the use of her manners in the book toward elder strangers. Despite the fact, as she gets deeper into wonderland, she seems to become frustrated and forgets to be polite. The ever so popular tea party appears when Alice, the M...
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland follows the story of young Alice trapped in the world of Wonderland after falling down through a rabbit-hole. The rabbit-hole which is filled with bookshelves, maps, and other objects foreshadows the set of rules, the ones Alice is normally accustomed to, will be defied in Wonderland. This conflict between her world and Wonderland becomes evident shortly after her arrival as evinced by chaos in “Pool of Tears” and Alice brings up the main theme of the book “was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I am not the same, the next question is who am I?” (Carroll 18). After Alice fails to resolve her identity crisis using her friends, Alice says “Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up: if not, I’ll stay down here til I’m somebody else” (Carroll 19). Hence in the beginning, Alice is showing her dependency on others to define her identity. Nevertheless when her name is called as a witness in chapter 12, Alice replies “HERE!” without any signs of hesitation (Carroll 103). Close examination of the plot in Alice in Wonderland reveals that experiential learning involving sizes leads Alice to think logically and rationally. Alice then attempts to explore Wonderland analytically and becomes more independent as the outcome. With these qualities, Alice resolves her identity crisis by recognizing Wonderland is nothing but a dream created by her mind.
In the opening scene, Alice desires something beyond orthodox. This is showed by her lack of interest in her studies and longing for a world in which everything would be “nonsense.” She is a curious child. Deborah Ross argues that Alice expresses the usual idealistic desires: “to escape boredom (with lessons), to satisfy curiosity (about the white rabbit), and above all, to exert power” (Ross 57). However Alice does not know exerting power is difficult when the world is consumed of “nonsense”. Thus she has different qualities that contributes to her vague identity. She believes life would be different in her world. Also Disney strives to reveal Alice’s incentive of Wonderland by introducing pictorial wonders such as singing flowers and surrealistic insect, making it seem as a dream. The movie progresses in the same route as Lewis Carroll’s book by focusing on her immature thinking of Wonderland.
Some of the most important themes of the play are shown in Act 1 Scene
...her life. A long the novel, we can see how Chamber shows that feelings of confusion, excitement and fear are common to all teenagers, regardless of their historical setting, as they struggle to come into their own. He shows completely different stories of two teenagers who live in two completely different decades and yet share the same struggle to find their places in the world. At the same time this novel shows that young adults “deal with problems that have concerned individuals for centuries: honesty, developing friendships, overcoming loneliness, finding a place in society, and dealing with family member” (Bucher and Manning 165) which makes young adults to feel more understand and realised that they are not alone and that all his friends are going through the same situations and that at the same time those adults around them have gone through the same as well.