Once More To The Lake By E. B White Analysis

Vanessa Soler
Professor Isabel Grayson
English 109
September 17, 2013
The Reality of Life In the essay, “Once More to the Lake” by E.B White, a father returns with his son, to a vacation lake in Maine, where his father used to take him when he was younger. When the father spends time there with his son, he begins to reminisce on the experience he shared at the lake with his own father. The thought of immortality and timelessness tricks the narrator into believing no time has passed. While the father is referring back to these memories, the author makes a transition from fantasy to reality. Eventually, the father identifies differences in what his son experiences at the lake and what he experienced at the lake when he was a child. The
author shows the shifting between what he thinks is real and what is not. He witnesses a lake that to him never changes because he sees himself in his son. In the essay, “Once More to the Lake”, through the use of illusions shifting from fantasy to reality, and then the termination of these misconceptions, the father comes to the realization that time does not stop and everyone experiences life differently, creating their own memories. From the father perspective, time appears to stand still in “Once More to the Lake.” Timelessness is represented through the description of the ocean.
The ocean acts as a symbol of a child’s best friend, encouraging the child to the fearless and chase adventure. However, the father views the ocean differently, as he sees the ocean being dangerous. As stated in the text “I have since become a salt-water man, but sometimes in summer there are days when the restlessness of the tides and the fearful cold of the sea water and the incessant wind which blows across the afternoon and into the evening make me wish for placidity of a lake in the woods” (pg 1). This quote shows that the father is fearful of the sea, and seeks the comfort of the lake because how the waves of the ocean represent no control. Summer symbolizes the father’s favorite time of the year, Summertime, oh summertime, pattern of the indelible, the fade proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweet fern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end; this was the background, and the life along the shore was the design, the cottages with their innocent and tranquil design...”(pg3). This shows the father using imagery to describe his childhood trips to the lake to bond with his father period. The positive descriptions of beauty of their annual trips show s the happy memories he associates with the season. He becomes lost in these memoires and is convinced that times does not exist. “That the
years were a mirage and there had been no years” (pg 2). The father looks at life as if he were still a child and as if nothing has changed over time. The father begins to realize that time is starting to change but he doesn’t want to believe it.
He sees that things have changed from when he was a child. When he brings his son to the diner that he use to go to, he was surprised to find that the same people who work there had ages tremendously “There was a choice of pie for dessert, and one was blueberry and one was apple, and the waitresses were the same country girls, there having been no passage of time, only the illusion of it as it dropped curtain—the waitresses were still fifteen; their hair had been washed, that was the only difference—they had been to the movies and seen the pretty girls with clean hair” (pg 3). The father sees the same girls that always waited on him when he went to the dinner and he first walks into the diner. He convinces himself that nothing has changed except their hair, when in reality they grew up and got older. The father thinks that having three roads rather than two is a better because he is given more of a choice to get to his destination. The father looks at this situation as if he only has two choices instead of three, as he is getting older, he feels as if his life is limited in choices. “Up to the farmhouse to dinner through the teeming, dusty field… I missed terribly the middle alternative” (pg 3). The narrator’s childhood memories were that there were three option of walking the paths, but now that he is realizing time is passing, he recognizes that the road has changed. The
Father takes a step back from reality and looks at his life as if he is living two lives. We knows this when he says,. “I seemed to be living a dual existence” (pg 2). The Father now sees himself looking at life from two different perspectives, the views from his childhood and the view he now has as an adult. The breaking of the illusion is finally here, whem he sees death in two different perspectives. “During the daytime, in the hot mornings, these motors made petulant, irritable sounds; at night, in the still evening when the afterglow lit the water, they whined about one’s ears like mosquitoes.” (pg 4) This quote represents death to the narrator, “Motor boats in those days did not have clutches, and you would make a landing by shutting off the motor at the proper time and coasting in with a dead rubber. There was a way of reversing them, if you learned the learned the tricks, by cutting the switch and putting it on again exactly on a final dying revolution of the flywheel, so that it would kick back against compression and begin reversing.” (pg 4) This quote represents the reverse of death to the narrator. “Then the kettle drum, then snare, then the bass and cymbals, then crackling light against the dark, and the gods grinning and licking their chops in hills. After the calm, the rain steadily rustling in the calm lake, the return of light and hope and spirits, and the campers running out in joy and relief to go swimming in the rain, their bright cries perpetuating the deathless jokes about how they were getting simply drenched, and the joke about getting drenched linking the generations in a strong indestructible chain.” (pg 5) The father believes that storms symbolize life and death. After the illusion breaks, he takes and outlook on life and studies his son as if it were himself as a little child. He watches his son struggle to put on a wet bathing suit like he did as a child and realizes that’s the way he was looking at his child is exactly the way his father use to look at him when he was a child. As he notices that time never stops he felt death throughout his whole body especially in his groin where the next generation comes from.