Ai Wei Wei

When I decided to write about this topic for my honors project and then read a To Kill a Mockingbird and later read a much more contemporary story, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, I noticed a strong difference in my emotional reactions to both those novels, and as opposed to just doing a self-discovery themed honors project, I decided to analyze these works and determine how classic novels like Mockingbird can bring out different reactions from readers as opposed to a contemporary novel like Wallflower. Stories about people (especially adolescents) discovering a part of themselves that they have never known, literary or mainstream, may have similar premises of childhood and adolescense, but they seem to omit differing emotions to readers because of literary elements that change how the reader thinks about the novel. In this way, the contemporary setting of the 21st century has changed the viewpoints of millennial audiences in reading fiction through historical changes, their presentations of conflict, and their language and grammar.

First of all, the historical movements and events of our time have always affected the way we tell our stories and the internal and external struggles of the protagonists in those stories that correspond with the events. Stories have always been a response to the modern times. As the times, industries and modalities change, so do the stories. To Kill a Mockingbird takes place in the 1930’s, a period of economic turmoil in the Great Depression. In addition, the racial tension in the time period that affects the main conflict of the story in a black man’s rxxe trial, also a prominent presence throughout the story. Harper Lee’s rich, well-fleshed out characters are deeply influenced by the time period, so reading about an era several decades ago can give the reader an insight of what the time period was like, but can also make it very hard to connect with the external struggles of these characters living in a time that we cannot genuinely know what is like. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky’s high school coming-of-age story, takes place in a more modern new era of cliques and teen social structures, and through this viewpoint, we see our protagonist Charlie’s discoveries about friendship that he makes throughout the story be very similar to our own. These characters can be more relatable for readers since the protagonists are teens living in a generation adjacent to ours, so their situations and stories can be elevated to a level of emotion that Mockingbird cannot, through its scenarios that are very reminiscent of the real world. In Wallflower, there is one primary factor of the historical context of the novel, however, that keeps it from having the wide-reaching connection between the author and the reader. Paper Towns, a novel by contemporary teen coming-of-age writer John Green, may have the most deep-rooted connection with the reader when reading it due to the story and characters taking place in our own generation – the era of technology. The use of technology in the novel as an incitement of conflict, causing endless chaos, is very reminiscent of our generation and its unique qualities, so I think this novel may just be the most ex