Fragments in the Contemporary World and YAL

The

world

falls

into

fragments.

Please. We. Need. Somebody. To. Craft. The. Fragments. Into. A. Patch-work. Because. An. Art-work. Of. Patches. Could. Keep. Everything. Together.

I found that fragmentation is one major theme in the contemporary Young Adult Literature (YAL) pieces that I read, in addition to my classmates’ reviews about the novels they read. The repetitive finding of this theme in YAL leads me to acknowledge that fragmentation is one dominant feature of today’s world, mirrored in today’s YAL.

In the novel Skin, Adrienne Maria Vrettos, exposes the reader to fragments. The family in Skin falls apart. The parents’ regular fights dominate their family life and inflict the children with identity problems. Finally, the family life shatters into pieces, leaving its members destroyed. In contrast, the graphic novel, Escape from Special, by Miss Lasco-Gross, does not express the fragment theme in the plot of the story. Insteaed, Lasco-Gross uses a fragmental structure. The whole story is built of numerous mini stories, glimpses, moments, and images. Also the graphic comic style is a fragmental structure in itself. Comic books use direct, clear images for the reader’s senses. Pictures satisfy the visual sense, but comics also give information about smell, sound, taste, and touch. In addition, comics provide short expressions of thoughts, dialogues, and background information. The reader of a comic is exposed to direct, short, fragmental sensations as opposed to long monologues or meditative reflections.

Both of these novels, Skin and Escape from Special, elaborate on the current real-life issue of fragmentation. Scattered families and single parent families are not an exception anymore. Vrettos expresses the harmful effect of this tendency on children in her novel.

Besides families, fragmentation is visible in other areas of society. Exploding new technologies, such as text messages and online writing, invites to shorter, fragmented writing styles. People want tons of information, fast. They are not willing to spend much time on an online reading. Such as the remote control of the TV invites to easy channel surfing, the mouse click is too easy to rest at one site for long. Teens, especially, invent more and more short cuts in the language, such as lol.

I even suspect that the unintentional usage of sentence fragments has a connection to the fragmented society. If a fragment “sounds” right to the writer, then he thinks in fragments, which does not surprise me in a fragmented society. After all, experts use sentence fragments, too. As literature mirrors real life conflicts, fashion uncovers what is wrong (or interesting, if you will) in society, as do these fragmented jeans.

Another side effect of our fragmented society is the increasing number of students with shortened attention span. As mentioned before, technology gives the reader a lot of information, fast, and is entertaining. Nobody would read a text message that takes pages, except, maybe a love text message.

This article about attention span connects the “virtue” of multi tasking with the phenomenon of shortened attention. Although for society, multitasking is a virtue, I have always been suspicious towards multitasking. First, I cannot do it, and second, I don’t want to learn it. The ability of multi tasking is expected in many jobs these days (see the special abilities section of this student job offer); however, the truth is that we cannot give our whole attention, I mean hundred percent, to every task that we are trying to do at the same time. We just can’t. What we gain on one hand, the quantity; we lose on the other, the whole experience. Besides lowering the attention span, multitasking thus is a sad phenomenon that expresses, once again, the fragmentation of society. YAL authors respond to the wide-spread short attention span with comic novels and short chapters.

The phenomenon of fragmentation in our society leads to other trends as well. Naturally, everything that scatters; such as families, language, jeans, and attention; loses cohesion. A fragment of a whole must function as an individual. In order to protect one’s self, individuals must be careful, defiant, and suspicious. Not surprisingly, we live not only in a time of fragments but also in one of fear and mistrust.

Story of a Girl, by Sara Zarr, mirrors the mistrust of society within the family of her novel. As Zarr shows, fear and mistrust inhibit the ability to forgive and to reconnect. Similarly, Doing It Right, by Bronwen Pardes, informs teens about sex. She responds to the tremendous lack of sexual information for teens, caused by mistrust.

America is famous for being obsessed with law suits. As if we lived in a civil war, everybody is suspicious and hostile towards each other, with good reason, or are we not all little helpless cullets in a big, dangerous world. However, the penalty of an offender does not heel any wounds. The only thing that could help the victims of crime is safety and forgiveness, not revenge. Instead, the hunt for penalty and revenge is a breeding ground for more suspicion. In a well-functioning group, such as a family or a society, one member can trust and forgive another member, which is unlikely to happen in a crushed union. Divorced couples can often only communicate through their attorneys, and members of broken communities are not willing to forgive each other. The main character in Story of a Girl shows the power of forgiveness on her relationships, most of all in her relationship with herself.

Story of a Girl also expresses the common real life phenomenon that parents often mistrust their own children when it comes to adolescence. In order to protect their children from their natural, youthful attraction to risks, parents try to keep them ignorant or to impose overly strict regulations on them until this risk-taking phase is over, as does the father in Story of a Girl. In real life, the book banning movement shows this parental attempt to protect their children from “harmful” material. Nevertheless, teens sometimes run into misfortune because they are not informed. They are risk takers, yes, but most of them do want to live happily and healthy. Informing them, for example, about the consequences of sex, helps them to make “wise decisions,” as Bronwen Pardes tries to communicate.

In a scattered society, we need to be careful that we, the pieces, don’t get lost. In art, music and literature, we can play with the fragments and make sure they still make some sense.

By. Writing. Stories. Authors. Of. YAL. Create. A. Patchwork. Of. The. Fragments. In. the. World. And. Give. Its. Parts. New. Meaning.