What We All Long For – UNIVERSAL THEMES - Divides

What We All Long For – UNIVERSAL THEMES

The RURAL/URBAN OUTSIDER/INSIDER Divide: How does the experience of these characters compare with my own at that age? The novel made me more conscious of the difference between growing up in a city and moving to a city when you leave home as I did at age 17. All rural children leave home as soon as they finish school, to find work or go on to post-secondary education. The ties are cut. You choose to go home perhaps two or three times a year. Rural people find a longed-for anonymity in the city where no one knows them, their parents, their families. They long to be as common, as unexceptional as a pebble on a beach, in order to be like the others or to find themselves. Psychologically, this is a very different way of growing up than it is for urban children living at home, guilted into visiting, bumming food and cash, being forced to create a scene, to be angry, to reject, in order to make the break which will allow them to grow up, become independent adults, if ever. Each of the characters in What We All Long For struggles to make this break, to cut the cord to their childhood past. They struggle to break away from their parents. They already have a circle of friends on whom they rely emotionally and financially. Their parents, like everyone coming from elsewhere, struggled without assistance to integrate into the city.