Emma, Huck Finn, and Asher Lev: Coming of Age Novels

This essay compares and contrasts three literary pieces that hardly seem to have anything in common except that they all belong to the coming of age genre. Emma was written by the British author Jane Austen in the 1790s, but was published in 1816. It is a literary work that dates back to the Romantic era. Emma tells the story of a young girl whose opinion of her self seems to be a little too high. On the one hand Emma suffers from loneliness, and on the other, she can not find a match that is good enough for her. While she plays matchmaking for her friends, Emma seems to almost be deliberately pairing people wrongly.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, written by Mark Twain in 1884, is known as one of the pioneer works in Modern American literature. Huck, a young boy, runs away from his drunken father in search of freedom and adventure.

Jewish writer Chaim Potok's novel, My Name is Asher Lev, was published in 1972 and is a work pertaining to the postmodern era. My Name is Asher Lev tells the story of a young artist, Asher Lev, who goes against his religious convictions to pursue his art. Asher's faith, Hasidic Judaism, holds the belief that art is the devil's work.

In their own way all three protagonists set out on a journey of self-awareness. However, this journey appears in many forms-physical and psychological. The journey allegory is a significant literary theme that dates back to the classical epoch with Homer's Odyssey, repeated in medieval times with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and taken up again and again in almost all literary eras. The physical journey on which the literary character sets out turns out to be a metaphor of his psychological and spiritual journey towards self-awareness, which is obviously part of the process of the coming of age. At the end of the journey, the character comes out grown and psychologically matured.