Characters In Jason Reynolds's 'Long Way Down'

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Rune Mahlum Mr. Waghorn English 3W 21 May, 2024 Coming of Age Essay How do characters in stories advance and mature over time? This process is called the coming-of-age process and it’s very important when determining how characters advance over time. It’s the way that young characters grow up and become men and show a little more maturity. The stages of the coming-of-age process consist of love, loss/grief, empathy, identity, and parents. These stages don’t occur in a specific order, rather some of them will occur during the character's development arc. I will be demonstrating that grief and love are two major parts of a developing character. In the book, Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds, the main character Will undergoes grief because his brother …show more content…
Grief can occur in all sorts of scenarios, while the most common tend to be the loss of a family member or friend, but it could also be losing a leg or body part through amputation. Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds is a novel about a kid named Will who loses his older brother. Will is very inexperienced at the start and solely wants to follow “the rules”. These rules are generational rules passed down in the family and the rules are no crying, no snitching, and always get revenge. He was very quick to jump to conclusions and immediately jumped to rule 3 and was out for revenge. On his way down the elevator of his apartment, when going down to get revenge, he meets ghosts of his old family and friends that were killed. The ghosts tell him about additional ways that trying to shoot who he thinks killed his brother would go. Some things the ghosts tell Will are that he could miss, they could get revenge on him after killing the guy, or it could’ve been someone else. He experienced grief at the start of the book when his brother died. Talking to the ghosts, Will matures and realizes that it might not be the right thing to do and it’s safe to assume that he had a lot of second
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