Short Story Essay: Maturity

Short Story Essay

All humans go through a stage of maturity, some handle it better than others and it is caused and affected by many different situations like, poverty, location, age, or feelings. I think that all four stories, Marigolds, Visit to Grandmother, Summer of Truth and Flight all have to do with maturity. Both Marigolds and Flight have characters that face maturity, going from being immature to becoming mature. While Visit to Grandmother and Summer of Truth the characters are immature in the beginning of the story and by the end they don't end up changing for the better.

The story Marigolds and Flight have immature characters at the start of the short story but by the end they grow, change, and, most importantly, they mature. In Marigolds the character facing maturity is Lizabeth. At the beginning she is immature as shown in this quote "Ð'...the great need for my mother who was never there, the hopelessness of our poverty and degradation, the bewilderment of being neither child nor woman and yet both at once,Ð'..." this quote is when she is tearing out the flowers, showing how immature she is for doing something so evil just because there so beautiful. This quotation also shows the reason why she is doing this and being immature, it says she is doing it because she doesn't have that mom figure to ascendant or help her along the way; another reason is they don't have opulence. Yet as time goes on Lizabeth matures, this is shown at the end of the story where she tells us that she, too, now is planting marigolds. This tells us she has grown up; she regrets what she did you Miss Lottie and is trying to correct things by planting the flower. Flight is that other short story that goes along and has the same situation as Marigolds. Pepe says he is a man but doesn't act like one because he is lazy doesn't work. Quickly, though, Pepe gets the opportunity to become a man by going to Monterey, killing a man, and having to escape to the mountains to survive, all in a short period of time. All in all I think Pepe couldn't handle to pressure with such little experience which resulted in his death.

Those two stories were about going from immature to mature, while Visit to Grandmother and Summer of Truth are about being immature and staying that way. In Visit to Grandmother Charles, a 40 year old man, lies to is son to get him to go to his grandmother's house, the first showing of immaturity. Later on during dinner time, after many stories have been shared, Charles erupts and lets all of his emotions out all of which are at his mother. A 40 year old man is just now letting out emotions that he has been having for 30 years, another incident of immaturity. By the end of the story and the yelling and release of emotions, Charles way of resolving