Passport

Spencer Nee

Ashley Boyd—English 325 YA Lit

September 18,2014

Passport—Blog 3

I loved “Passport”!  It was so well written that I couldn’t tell how it was going to end.  I wanted to look ahead the whole time because I didn’t want the narrator to go to boot camp.  I felt like by considering his divorced parent’s homes as two different kingdoms added to the plot.  It made it sound more war like, it convinced me that the story was going to end with him at boot camp miserable.  I also appreciate the parenthetical dialogue that the author included.  I think the story was simple enough that I would have understood the point of what the characters were saying, but the clarity made it more enjoyable.  This is my favorite type of plot because the peak of it is at the end of the story so there is no come down.  I think it makes it more fun to leave what happens after the peak up to the reader.  I found it strange that the narrator had such a feeling of lust for his father’s new girlfriend.  That just seemed strange and unnecessary to me.  The only reason it helped the story was because she was close to the narrators age which seems stereotypical of post-divorce wealthy middle-aged men.  I just don’t know why it was important to include his feelings for her, but it must have been because every word in a short story is important.

I think that this text really portrayed an interesting aspect of adolescents.  Young adults are expected to decide their future at such a confusing time in their lives and I think the author did a great job of showing an option that I think is a good option.  I have this theory that we can learn as much through travelling and being immersed in other cultures as we can in a classroom.  I also think that there is so much that changes in young adults between their last day of high school and a year later.  That year gives adolescents a chance to grow and become the person that they want to be.  I think it would be beneficial if more young adults took a year off of school to travel and to learn about another part of the world.  We have our whole lives to work, so what’s the hurry to get to a job that is just enough to get us by?  I think adolescents would benefit from reading this story because it would show them that it is possible to travel and it isn’t necessary to go straight to college or any other post high school career.  I rate this short story with an A- because while I think it was an influential piece and enjoyable I think it lacks depth.  I think it is a very simple story about teen rebellion.