The world that Homer's Telemachus faced was quite different than that of John Grimes, the protagonist of James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain. Yet their stories have much in common. The coming-of-age genre is all about seeing the world through different eyes. Baldwin captures the very essence of the genre in his novel when he writes:
"... only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place."
The protagonist finds, whether they are Telemachus, Huck Finn, or Jean Louise Finch, that their childhood views on how the world works no longer fit what they see and feel.
In Nic Stone's Dear Martin, high school senior Justyce McAllister finds himself facing a world that no longer plays nicely with his childhood conceptions. Words and actions take on a different weight, values are challenged, and the things he has taken for granted have lost their stability. Feeling lost in this new world, he looks for a foundation - a mentor - to help guide him through these changes. In his journal he begins writing "letters" to Martin (Dr. Martin Luther King); nothing existential or philosophical, simply the events of his days, and the doubts and questions of a young person dealing with huge changes.
Needless to say, the late Dr. King does not answer Justyce's letters, anymore than the long-absent Odysseus answered his son Telemachus. The passage from the innocence of childhood into the world of the adult is a highly personal one, there are no pat answers. In her closing note to Dear Martin, author Nic Stone sums up Justyce's path this way:
"... while the answers can be hard to come by, the point is to find the courage to ask the questions in the first place. I hope his journey will give you a way to identify your own questions. And answers."
The goal of the coming-of-age story, and I believe, literature in general, is to provoke questions, not necessarily to provide answers. Life is a highly personal journey; we should beware of anyone or anything that proclaims to have the answer for everything. Even if answers are hard to come by, it is vitally important to ask the questions, both of our world, and of ourselves.
