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Sag Harbor and the End of Summer

 


     As not only a coming of age novel but one based on the author's own childhood, Sag Harbor excells at portraying the different aspects of what summer is like growing up. From the excitment and desire to reinvent yourself that comes with the start of the summer, to the bittersweetness of the end, Sag Harbor uses these universal parts of the summer experience as a teenager to make the novel even more compelling. Regardless of whether you stay in the same place all summer, or don't do nearly as many things as Benji and his friends did, there will likely be an aspect of the novel that's relatable. 

    For me, one of the aspects of summer that Colson Whitehead did the best at portraying was the bittersweet feeling that comes with the end of it. The final chapter of Sag Harbor, called "The Black National Anthem", represents the culmination of the events of the summer, and includes an outlook on the schoolyear to come. It also features Benji coming, at times literally, face to face with the fact that he is growing up. This theme is best seen with the scene where Benji watches the last race, and he desribes an intersection of nostalgia and anxiety for his future. "Every summer this shifting over took place in small degrees as you moved closer to the person who was waiting for you to catch up and some younger version of yourself elbowed you out of that way." (Whitehead 262) He represents this not only as a transition, but as a cycle that it's his turn now to participate in. Benji looks for the kid that will "replace" him, deciding on the kid who almost got last, and emphasizing with his awareness and anixety about fitting in. Benji even says, "Yeah, he has to be me. The look of fret when he slips up and for a second other people can see it."(Whitehead 264) As Benji literally goes face to face with a reminder that he's no longer a kid anymore, he also looks into the crowd to find the adult that he'll eventually replace. 

    Benji's awareness and agknowledgement of the end of the summer as a transition in his life is a universal feeling, and I can remember all the times that I've worried about my future when the reality I'm going back to school hits me. It's easy to get caught so up in the fun of summer that you don't realize how fast it went by, and that you're already on to a new period of your life. Sag Harbor's portrayal of this experience and the representation of the summer teenage experience cements it as a compelling and memorable coming of age novel.


Comments

  1. Ruby MitchellMay 30, 2025 at 9:40 PM

    Hey Chloe! I think this was a super interesting theme in Sag Harbor, especially considering the fact that the end of summer was kind of the looming threat throughout the whole book, similar to how real summer is. This was a super interesting book to read at the end of the school year for that exact reason. I think the end of summer also fits very well with the coming of age narrative, especially considering the promise of a huge transformation over the summer.

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  2. MitchellJune 2, 2025 at 8:39 AM

    My whole life has been marked by this summer-vacation dynamic--I've somehow orchestrated it so that I've always been subject to the school-year schedule, either as a student or a teacher. And EVERY SINGLE YEAR without fail I experience the same intense feeling of melancholy at the transition from summer to fall: I can be genuinely excited for what the new school year holds; I can be eager to get back into the classroom and get into these books with some smart kids; I can even be frankly bored with the relative aimlessness of my summer days (that's very hard to imagine at the moment, but it has happened). But it doesn't matter--there's something about that sense of an *ending*, of one more year gone by, where we can't help but mark ourselves and various kinds of "progress" against where we were the year before.

    But let's not think too much about any of that right now--it's time for summer break!

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