There Are No Children Here

How is this novel similar to other pieces of literature (poems, novels, films) that we have studied in class?


While reading this novel I hadn't really thought of it connection to Lord of the Flies, but now that I'm done the connection is obviously evident. In Lord of the Flies the boys on the island are originally naive and self centered, and still boys at heart. However they are forced to take control and fend for themselves when they see there are no adults to help them and they themselves have to become the adults. This is similar to the way the children in There Are No Children Here grow up in their adolescence. Due to their negative and harsh surroundings the kids must stand up and find out who they are for themselves. Despite the yearning to help from their parents there isn't anything more they can do to prevent their children from growing up to fast and becoming the adults they will be for the rest of their lives, only in there teenage years. Kotlowitz said it him self, "despite all they have seen and done, they are-and we must constantly remind ourselves of this- still children" (Kotlowitz xi). They fact that they have experience much more than many who are older than them gives them a sense of maturity and it can be deceiving to those who interact with them.

Another book that I thought of while readin was Tuesday's with Morrie, even though these books have nothin in common plot wise I noticed thjat they both had many flash backs throughout the novels. In the novel Tuesdays with Morrie Mitch is a college student who admires Morrie and takes all of his avaliable lectures and classes. When he graduates he promises to keeping contact but it fails. His life proceedes and eventually his job fails and he is left uninspired in life. One day he sees Morrie on a tv interview and flies to Duluth to be reunited with his old teacher. We discover that Morrie has ASL, a disease that eats away atyour soul and slowly shuts down your body fnctions, never the less Mitch returns ever week to sit and talk with the proffessor and they re member back to the times when Morrie taught Mitch as a student. These numerous flashback is what is similar between this novel and There Are No Children Here. In Kotlowitz's novel LaJoe, the mother of the children, remebers alot about the 'projects', before they were ruined. She herself grew up as a child in the 'projects' and when she grew up se decide to stay there, despite the reckage it had become. In one section she says how when she was a girlscout she used to have her meetings in the basement of the complex, but as time went on it became a pit, groungy, ill infested, condemabhle, and compliled with loads of trash (Kotlowitz 121). LaJoe made many other references to her childhood but that one stuck out the most to me. The fact that a little girls oasis in a harsh life is now a garbage dump, so to speak, is a odd visualization. Over all these two novels are majorly relate due to their excessive flash back by the eldest and most noledgeable characters in the novels.