2 The Initiation Story

An initiation story is a fiction where the protagonist has his life changed. In most cases, the most important character is a young boy or a girl who become mature as they undergo some events. Often readers can learn a lot from those stories and that’s the reason why teachers and parents usually choose initiation story to educate students and children. Not only children themselves can be inspired from it but also adults are enlightened by reading it.

There are many well-known initiation stories in the world. For example, “The Found Boat” written by Alice Munro, “Araby” written by James Joyce and Hemingway’s “The Killers”. This chapter will present what is the initiation story and analyze some representative American initiation stories.

2.1 Definition and Origin of the Initiation Story

The name and conceptual analysis of initiation story are mainly from anthropology. As an anthropologic term it means “the process of transformation from childhood or adolescence to maturity and full membership in adult society”. The most important rites of most primitive cultures center on the passage from childhood or adolescence to maturity and full membership in adult society. Anthropologists call these rites initiation or puberty ceremonies. These rituals involve physical torture, cutting of many different parts of body and ritualistic use of food, isolation, humanization and indoctrination in secret tribal beliefs. According to most anthropologists, the aim of these rites is to test the endurance of the novice, to assure his loyalty to the tribe, and to maintain the power of the adult community. But a few anthropologists believe that they stem from a psychological compulsion to comfort the adult community or supernatural powers.文献综述

From Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1969: 222), a clear definition of “initiation story” is concluded: it is a kind of story whose overall plot involves the change of a protagonist, who often but not always be a child or a young teenager, suffers some kind of sorrow and agony that never appears among his/her previous life experience, and then he/she first learns a significant, usually life-changing truth about the universe, society, people, and himself/herself. He/she begins to change his/her own way of valuing the world or personality through this kind of suffering. In other words, through his particular experience – initiation, the instinctive nature of the protagonist gets matured and sophisticated. He/she no longer shows naivety or puerility from this change. It has “reformulated” himself/herself to become “a different person”.

In American literary theory, the term “the initiation story” first appears after the Second World War. As the term “initiation” is borrowed from anthropology, many of the definitions of the literary equivalent are centered on the original concept. Nowadays, as initiation rites are seldom found, the term had to be adapted, though. Other characteristics have replaced the ritual aspects in order to define stories of initiation. There are, however, still some definitions which also implements rituality in literary realizations of the initiation theme. This hypothesis has aroused controversy and it is difficult to define ritualistic behavior in daily life. Furthermore, these ritualistic initiation stories include “adult society deliberately testing and indoctrinating the youngsters”, which is only found in a “very small proportion of works called initiation stories”.