Exploration of Mortality, Sexuality, and Humanity in Ferris Beach :: McCorkle Ferris Beach Essays

Exploration of Mortality, Sexuality, and Humanityin Ferris Beach throughout the journey of life, each person experiences events, emotions, and consequences that cannot be explained. Situations do not always turn out for the best, and it is human nature to attempt to come to about type of understanding or answer as to why matters argon the way they are. In Ferris Beach, a bildingsroman, or the story of a girls climax of age, Kate Burns grapples with questions of life and death as she seeks some sort of business relationship for her problems. Her fight to comprehend the events in her life are shown in her exploration of mortality, sexuality, and humanity. Death is always a hard concept with which one mustiness deal at some point in life. Kate wonders what is loose in the world and why people close to her are taken forth forever in the deaths of Mo Rhodes and her father Fred. On Independence Day, the bootleg beginning of the catastrophe unfolding, Kate experiences her first adu lt troubles. Similar to Jem and Scout Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird, Kate moves through her innocence into experience with some provable and some inconspicuous brushes with the adult world. As she sits with dazed observing the fireworks, she senses the troubles in her best friend. I turned to Misty, ready to ask her why her parents had left, moreover she was sitting there hugging her knees with her head dropped back as she stared up at the sky...there was something in her silence that made me hold my question, and instead I inched over closer to her, hugged my knees, and stared up just as she was doing (McCorkle 81-82). Kate is aware that something has kaput(p) awry but she does not accurately know what the situation is. condescension the distractions of the fireworks, her fathers comments, the boys fighting on the beach, and Mrs. Pooles endless chatter, Kate focuses on the most important (though silent) thing going on with Misty. The faint hint of disarray in Misty pre cedes Kates reaction to Mos death. Kate, throughout the novel, watches different people and, from her fellowship, she can see into the Rhodess and Huckss houses. She watches Mistys house after Mos car accident and comments that Misty ...looked so pale and that the all family ...froze like the end of a play(McCorkle 91).