Naivete

In the chapter The Lives of the Dead, O'Brien talked about the girl he loved long ago...when he was nine. To me, this was unbelievable at first. Who can fall in love when they are nine years old? I'm pretty skeptical of love in the first place because I think the word is thrown around too often anymore, and a grown man talking about nine year old love is pretty improbable. As I continued to read the chapter, I thought about it more. O'Brien describes his love for Linda as "want[ing] to melt inside her bones-that kind of love." He admits to the how preposterous the idea is that he was in love at the age of nine. What allowed me to think about how he could have actually loved her was the fact that O'Brien experienced so much in his lifetime; it wasn't like he was naive when he was writing this novel, reflecting on his past. Oftentimes, young people don't know enough about themselves or the world, which can create a confusion in one's mind about love. I'm not trying to say that I don't believe in young love (I mean, my parents, as well as my grandparents, are high school sweethearts), I just think that O'Brien may have loved her at the age of nine, with his innocent nine year old self. But Linda passed away at the age of nine; therefore, O'Brien can never truly know if his feelings for her would have differed as they matured and lost their naivete.