Milkweed Themes Essay

 Author's Note: This is an essay discussing the themes in "Milkweed". More specifically loss of innocence. I compared it to "Life of Pi".

People are dying in the streets. Dead bodies litter the ground, and poor souls  barely clinging to life stumble over the rubble. People are willing to eat anything that is digestible, anything to stay alive. But young Misha, unsure of his age, name, or past, seems oblivious to all this. Even though the Nazis are slowly torturing his friends, he loves them for their big black boots. That is, until the moment he finally figures out what is going on.

Misha is completely innocent,  he just doesn't seem to notice hat is happening in the ghetto. People are dying around him, and he doesn't even care. He was never able to live a normal life. And he realizes this when he is an adult and immigrates to America. He just babbles on street corners about his past, because he finally realizes what he really witnessed. The childhood moments with death and torture are stamped into his mind, and he will never be able to forget them. The effects of witnessing such horrible events have made it so it is impossible to live a normal life.

The same thing sort of happens in Life of Pi. When Pi is starving in the lifeboat, he does some things nobody would do in a normal situation. He resorts to cannibalism, and eats a part of the dead cook. He is a strict vegetarian, and he eats fish and other animals. All these events, especially the cannibalism, will cause his to not live a normal life. He will always have this on his conscience, the fact that he ate another human being. In a way, he lost his innocence when he resorted to cannibalism.

Just like Pi, Misha lost his innocence. He witnessed things that no person should ever witness, and as a result paid for it later on. He no longer was able to live a normal life with his memories imprinted in his mind. He was completely unaware of the fact that the Jews were being left alone to die inside the ghetto, until the moment he finally understands. From that moment on, he is tortured by his memories.