Everyone is a child at some point in his or her lives. That child, no matter the generation or situation they are born into, will experience some of the best and worst times that their emotional selves will feel. Herman Melville’s Redburn is the story of one of those children, Wellingborough Redburn, born into an expected life of ease and privilege but whose life takes a sharp turn with the bankruptcy and death of his father at a young age. This story has become known as a semi-autobiographical story of Herman Melville. Melville, whose character Redburn was a looser version of himself, was also the son of a deceased father. His Redburn’s future is unknown and undetermined post death of his beloved father. He struggles, as all children would move into the age of adolescence and into the portion of his existence where he must determine his future. Even though adolescence is a right of passage that everyone goes through and no one is exempt from, an adolescent's expectation of their place in life is almost always ill perceived due the reality of their actual state in life. This naivety can cause rage, embarrassment and cause them to feel superior over their peers rather than except their own reality where they long to belong and are prone to self-pity if it does not work out to their immediate gratification, and they usually walk around very self-centered, strong-willed and stubborn.
First, an adolescent's expectation…show more content… Jonathan Hall explains that:
Somehow Melville calls into question basic assumptions, both modern and those specific to the 1840s, about the process through which a boy is supposed, by progressive stages, to become a “mature” man, and about the way in which a “mature” man locks back on the events of his childhood and adolescence. ('Every Man of Them Almost Was a Volume of Voyages': Writing the Self in Melville's Redburn, p
