Summary Of Mary Lennox's Question Of Innocence

As soon as people can string a few words together to form a proper sentence as an infant, they start asking questions. They ask questions about their surroundings in an attempt to make sense of what goes on around them. A toddler’s question of ‘where’s mommy and daddy?’ when his parents have been out shopping for groceries can be answered without difficulty. But some questions, even when asked at such a young age, are difficult to answer. Questions like, “Why does nobody come? Why was I forgotten?” (Burnett 8), asked by Mary Lennox does not have the simple answer of ‘they were out shopping’ and even “they had died [from cholera]” (8) seemed incomplete. Mary, like any other child, was just questioning the absence of her parents because she wanted to understand. This need to ask questions and understand is prevalent in all humans. Mary embodies this need by
They start asking questions like why do earthquakes happen? Why do children die? The answers they are looking for are not that the tectonic plates breaking along a fault or that they were weak from poverty and disease. They want to know why bad things happen to good, innocent people. There is no definite answer to that. But whether or not there is an answer, why is the question people ask to gain a deeper understanding of the world. Esperanza asks “Why didn’t you hear me when I called? Why did you leave me all alone?” (Cisneros 100) after being sexually assaulted; she wanted to understand why Sally was not there to save her, and there was no definite answer. The closest answer to those questions was understanding that the world was a much crueler place than Esperanza realized. This is a truth of the world that was uncovered by questions. People ask questions to discover these truths about thew world, but very rarely do people direct the question ‘why?’ at