Ghost World, a reflect of our living world.

First of all, I would like to give a personal opinion about this novel since I strongly believe that it gives an ace to the heart to what teenager world is. In general, being a teenager is one of the most difficult periods of our lives; our minds are full of doubts, problems and undim thoughts which affect people’s lives and actions. This novel reflects this reality through the characters that appear in it, showing us a fragment of what adolescence is.


                                         

Ghost World is a graphic novel written by Daniel Crowel where the main characters are two best friends, Rebecca Doppelmeyer and Enid Coleslaw. In this novel we can realize the new importance of the concept "appearance", where it seems to be that it plays a very important role here, maybe because this novel is after 1990, where this kind of problems and visions were starting to become more usual.

           
On the one hand Enid is a girl who is usually making fun of people’s life styles and appearances. Enid cannot stand people who follow the typical tendencies, she always tries to be different from other people and that is the main reason why she cares so much about changing her appearance or look, since somehow, she tries to tell to the world that she is in fact, different.

On the other hand, Rebecca seems to be a “normal girl” compared to Enid, in fact, in a plethora of situations Enid calls Rebecca`s attention for liking articles or magazines related to teenagers lives since she finds that those articles are the responsible of creating a standardized society. Nevertheless, even when Rebecca seems to be very different compared to Enid, she does share some opinions with her and they really care about each other.

These two girls are immersed in a plot where we can actually see how they involve themselves in a world for them, a world where they can criticize; make assumptions and judge people just by the way they look.
 Due to the different thoughts in their minds, they actually start to believe things about people without any kind of evidence, just because the appearance tells them that they may be a specific kind of person, being blinded in their own thoughts about the world and people.Nevertheless, maybe if we go deeper we can say that Enid in fact was making the same mistake that the people who she hates make, and that is the permanent search of belonging to something. She was always arguing that she could not stand that kind of people, however, what would it happened if other people started to follow her style and beliefs about the world?, would it be an unpleasant stereotypes just as the ones that the people that she hates had?. Maybe she was not angry about the people following those stereotypes, maybe she was angry because those people were following stereotipes in which she could not fit.

 In this privatized world, where appearances are the most important factor at the moment of judging someone, we can see the reality of our world, at least for me the most interesting factor was the necessity of belonging to a group in order to find the identity that most of the teenagers try to obtain. It is incredible that those prejudices and judgments which are purely based on the appearance are still present in our lives, making us think that perhaps we have a long way to go before telling ourselves that we have progressed as human beings.