Analysis Of Coming Of Age In Contemporary American Fiction By Kenneth Millard

Kenneth Millard, in his book Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction, examines the coming-of-age genre and its place in American culture. He makes a relatively solid case that authors use adolescent characters to enact social change, accurately asserting that “adolescence, youth, [and] innocence...become an idealised fictional category which literary writers can use to give a particular urgency to representations of subjectivity and socialisation that highlight their own social and political anxieties” (Millard 12). The case demonstrated here, while mostly true, presents the reader with a somewhat biased interpretation of precisely how powerful these texts can be. While Millard recognizes that most coming-of- age novels are perceptions of adolescence as imagined by adults, he still fails to properly articulate how this idealized state of innocence authors choose to impose upon their young characters fails not only adolescents as a group, but society at large, particularly with regards to his assertion that coming-of-age novels are inherently tools of social change. Millard overestimates the extent of the power that adolescents, an as an extension coming-of-age narratives truly have over society.
Moreover, adults using adolescents, even fictitious ones, to their own ends as a means of social change is not the same as adolescents actually wielding the power to change society for themselves. Furthermore, characters in coming-of-age narratives are no more than reflections of society’s view of adulthood, and what constitutes it, and that view is