Revealing Wounds: Vulnerability and Ethnic Coming of Age in Gus Lee’s China Boy, Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Growing up and leaving behind the safety of childhood to venture into the adult world has always been regarded as a delicate transition in someone’s life. This journey, often full of hazards and challenges, is significantly shaped by the individual’s culture of reference; but if the latter’s ethos is questioned by a different set of ideals and beliefs, the journey can prove to be even more demanding. The United States, a country so diverse in terms of ethnic groups and related cultures, represent a unique terrain to examine this remarkable experience. This thesis investigates the role of vulnerability in ethnic American coming-of-age novels. Specifically, its corpus comprises Gus Lee’s China Boy (1991), Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007): these three literary works feature young protagonists with ethnic backgrounds (respectively Chinese, Dominican and Native American) trying to negotiate between their native culture and the American one. The thesis analyzes the interplay between vulnerability and the inner struggle experienced by the protagonists. In particular, it aims at exploring how vulnerability fosters in the characters an increased acknowledgement of their inner conflict, affecting their decision-making and thus representing a crucial element in their self-development. The first chapter describes the theoretical framework of the thesis, articulating the transformations of the Bildungsroman genre and its correlation with autobiographical writing, discussing Werner Sollors’ critical terminology of “descent” and “consent” and presenting the key concepts in the field of Vulnerability Studies. The second chapter offers a literary, socio-historical and thematic contextualization of the novels and a focus on the authors. The last two chapters present a close reading of some episodes of vulnerability represented in the texts, which are examined from two different thematic perspectives: bodily vulnerability; and vulnerable identity and relationality. The textual analysis illustrates and interprets the effects of these "revealing wounds" on the coming-of-age process of the novels’ protagonists, hopefully shedding light on the hurdles of growing up in America while having to come to terms with two different sociocultural systems.