Teenage Wasteland

An allusion is a reference to a person, place, thing, or other literary work. In “Teenage Wasteland,” the primary allusion is to “Baba O’Riley,” a 1971 song by The Who, a rock band known in the 1960s and 1970s for channeling the rebellious spirit of the 1960s. The chorus of the song is the phrase “teenage wasteland.” Popular interpretations of the song believe that the chorus refers to the use of drugs by young people in the 1960s to escape their conventional lives and reject the approval of older people. Other interpretations of the song focus on it as a denunciation of the 1960s as a moment of change that failed to deliver on its promise of a better future for young people. The permissiveness of the 1960s undercut the societal structures that young people felt inhibited by, but those who made the revolutions failed to offer an alternative vision for the young people who came after them.

Donny’s “jittery” (Paragraph 61) energy and drinking indicate that he might indeed be “wasted” in many of his encounters with his parents and school authorities. Beyond intoxication, Donny might also be lost because of the bleakness of the Cobles’ family life and middle-class American life during the early 1970s. The allusion to the song in the title, as a song that Cal plays while the teens hang out at his house, and as Daisy’s last vision in the last paragraph of the story strikes a somber, cautionary note about the idealism of the 1960s.