61 pages • 2 hours read
The Last Song
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Background
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness.
Genre Context: The Coming-of-Age Narrative in Nicholas Sparks’s Fiction
The Last Song functions as a contemporary coming-of-age story, or Bildungsroman, a genre that traces a protagonist’s journey from youthful rebellion to emotional and moral maturity. Author Nicholas Sparks adapts this tradition to his signature formula of Southern romance, where personal growth is catalyzed by first love, family tragedy, and reconciliation. His novels, including A Walk to Remember and The Notebook, consistently use the coastal North Carolina setting as a backdrop for these transformative experiences. The Bildungsroman itself has a long tradition in Western literature, originating in late-18th- and 19th-century German and English novels such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. Sparks’s contribution to this lineage is notable because he translates the form into popular romance, where spiritual and emotional awakening is interwoven with small-town Southern culture.
In The Last Song, protagonist Ronnie Miller embodies the archetypal rebellious adolescent. Estranged from her father and recently arrested, she arrives in Wrightsville Beach “so enveloped in misery” that she is hostile to everyone (5), especially her father.
