Preview

once more to the lake

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
949 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
once more to the lake
"Once More to the Lake" is an essay first published in Harper's magazine in 1941 by author E. B. White. Once more to the lake” is a personal and autobiographical writing shared by E.B.White and therefore, the main character is the author itself and White’s beloved family. In abstract “Once more to the lake” is a renowned writing of E.B.White in which the author narrates a story recalling his childhood experience of resorting to a lake in Maine, however the story pertains more with how the author is attached with his background when he revisits the lake with his child.
The plot synopsis revolves around how E.B.White cannot sustain the thought of his transformation from childhood to parenthood, stranded within the grooves of his mind and fantasied in a beautiful dream.

Moreover, this piece of writing is an extol vignette on a remarkable spiritual adventure.
“..But outside of that vacation was a success” reading this line spotlights that there was certainly a purpose behind writing this piece, a message for the readers to perceive. Each and every minute detail serves its cause.
“The author by using such overwhelming diction and insinuation when he mentions his illusion of dual existence and transposition makes concealing truth behind this story so credible.
Noticing the surroundings of the lake in Maine the author is amazed how nothing else time has changed. Apart from the tarred road and exclusion of the middle track, everything from the sprinkling of the cottages around the shores and the placidity of the lake are just how they were back in his early days.

“In the shallows, the dark, water-soaked sticks and twigs, smooth and old, were undulating in clusters on the bottom against the clean ribbed sand, and the track of the mussel was plain. A school of minnows swam by, each minnow with its small individual shadow, doubling the attendance, so clear and sharp in the sunlight.”

"I looked at the boy, who was silently watching his fly, and it was

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    White’s description of the cabins at the lake provides the first example of his focus on details, and this initiates his confusion of the present experience with the past. He writes that he remembered most clearly “the early mornings, when the lake was cool and motionless, remembered…

    • 361 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The story “Once More to the Lake” by E.B. White I believe the author was convincing in expressing his thought and intuition when reliving his childhood memories in the beginning of the story White start to recount the smells of the cabin the scent of the bedroom filled with lumber from the wet woods on his first time being back the first morning the author recall similar things about how his dad was when he just a kid himself visiting the cabin and the excitement he experienced his family visited the cabin around the beginning of August that was the beginning of summer and big business itself were farmers were out and active the author also reflected back on how to drive the boat he explained in great detail the ambience of the cabin during…

    • 250 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    E.B. White wrote the article “Once More to the Lake”in which it shows his internal struggle between acting and viewing the lake as he did when he was a boy and acting and viewing it as an adult.…

    • 201 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    White’s Once More to the Lake, White relives his experience at the same lake to which he visited as a child. He begins by describing the lake when he was a child and then progressing as he ages. The main purpose of doing so is to depict the effects of time on not only the setting, but on himself. Throughout the essay, White is constantly comparing himself to not only his son, but his own father. “I began to sustain the illusion that [my son] was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father” (White par. 4). One of the most prominent pieces of the essay that depicts the overall meaning is described in the very end of the essay. “I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death” (White par. 13). In these last sentences, White is not only realizing that he is middle-aged, but he is feeling what his son is feeling as he enters the cold lake water. Thus creating White’s dual-existance in the world; living as a child, as well as an adult. The diction of White’s essay seems to mimic the motions of the lake: calm and tranquil. While the tone of White in his essay is extremely nostalgic as he reluctantly accepts that time has aged him. White seems to struggle with living in this childhood memory of the lake, which appears to be so vivid that an illusion is created in his head in which White is…

    • 1020 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    White's Childhood Lake

    • 763 Words
    • 4 Pages

    “The small waves were the same, chucking the rowboat under the chin as we fished at anchor, and the boat was the same boat, the same color green and the ribs broken in the same places, and under the floorboards the same fresh water leavings and debris- the dead hellgrammite, the wisps of moss, the rusty discarded fishhook, the dried blood from yesterday’s catch” (White 195-196).…

    • 763 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    He makes no attempts at humor in his essay like Roberts does, but he instead paints pictures of scenery with words in exuberant detail. The depth and detail with which he writes stirs the readers’ emotions and memories in the way he tells of his own memories. He takes the mind of the reader on a journey with him as he recounts memories of his childhood. The tone he uses is one that is somber and serious, but also quite casual. “Summertime, oh summertime, pattern of life 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, their tiny docks with the flagpole and the American flag floating against the white clouds in the blue sky, the little paths over the roots of the trees leading from camp to camp and the paths leading back to the outhouses and the can of lime for sprinkling, and at the souvenir counters at the store the miniature birch-bark canoes and the post cards that showed things looking a little better than they looked.” (E.B. White) It is with the use of this kind of language that White fills the writing canvas, as well as the reader’s thoughts, with the detailed images of the surroundings of the…

    • 1546 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    "Once More to the Lake" written by E.B. White is a narrative essay in which White analyzes his conflict with time. The main subjects in this piece are time, childhood memories, and the lake. White conveys these subjects with a reminisent tone that denotes his great longing for these childhood memories to recur.White's essay "Once More to the Lake" shows an internal conflict with time and childhood memories through the use of diction, repetition of imagery, words, and sensory details that suggests the author’s abhorrence of change. While in the other essay, "Whistling Swan," written by Terry Tempest Williams uses a unfamiliar subject to compare the actions and attrocities that happened to a character.…

    • 443 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how the lake in Maine reminds White that he is an adult. By comparing his son’s actions with his own behavior years before, and by describing the lake’s appearance, White soon accepts…

    • 320 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    I think this selection is good literature because it helps the reader to think back on past experiences that were good with their parents and children and it is well thought out.…

    • 347 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The other wes moore

    • 1176 Words
    • 3 Pages

    It all starts with two young black boys. How they both ended up fatherless and with single mothers. Them both ending up in trouble with the law at about the same age. Wes explores the role of the mothers’ of himself and the other Wes. He remembers how his mother took his sisters and him to live with their grandparents after the death of his father when he was very young. He thinks about how strict his mother and grandparents were. Wes remains thankful for that…

    • 1176 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Parenthood Movie Review

    • 907 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The main character had a terrible relationship with his father. They didn’t see eye to eye at all. The father just took him to baseball games and left him there with an usher that he paid to watch him. The absence of a father figure was significant to his childhood. When he grew up he tried to be anything but that memory. He was involved in his children’s lives. This would be a family theme where the parent separates themselves from the child, so they could attend to their own matters in life. The next theme can be seen in the family that has the young girl being feed information like a sponge ruining her childhood so she could get ahead intellectually. The parents did not see her as a child but as some sort of machine. It is not the proper way to raise a child. She was socially awkward and didn’t have the social skills to socialize with the other children at Kevin’s birthday party. This theme is where the parents treat the child as an object rather than a living being. The next one is in the single mom with the two kids. She struggles to support for her family and her children disrespect her all the time. The son was so distant from her and left all the time, while the daughter was in love with a troubled boy. The son was having problems with himself since she went through puberty and he didn’t have a father figure to explain all the changes in his body and while he was feeling certain things. Todd became that father figure when he married the boy’s sister and got to explain what was happening through experience. This helped out the single mother trying to support her two children. The youngest son and brother of Gil the main character displayed the same type of parenting as the grandfather did with Gil, abandoning his child and dumping him with whoever would take care of him.…

    • 907 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    White appears to have arrived at a point in his life as an adult where he is tired of the hustle and bustle of his life and remembers the fun and also the peaceful times he had as a child at the lake. As a child, he and his family went there for the entire month of August every year because “none of them ever thought there was any place in the world like that lake in Maine” (163). White has not found another place that comes close to giving the same sense of pleasure that he and his family experienced at the lake in Maine. He wants to share this with his son so that he can experience the same sense of freedom that he had experienced as a child. White describes his trip and the arrival at the lake both in the present time and as he perceived it to be in his childhood. He shows the reader the many differences that have occurred to the area surrounding the lake. The road is now paved and goes the entire way to…

    • 2170 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Conflict: multiple conflicts: Mother vs. Son, White vs. Black, Old vs. New. Born in a total different time then his mother Julian struggles with his mother on racial. His mother struggles trough out the story with black people and memories.…

    • 324 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    A Day At The Lake

    • 183 Words
    • 1 Page

    “A Day at the Lake” is a narrative essay that follows all guidelines in the criteria. It is set in first person point of view. The writer uses vivid detail to describe important scenes and people. It contains meaningful dialogue that puts the reader in the writer’s shoes as he/she progresses through…

    • 183 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    once more to the lake

    • 513 Words
    • 3 Pages

    E.B. White's essay "Once More to the Lake" is a very well written piece of writing. That being saidI will first start breaking down the main points and different parts of this essay by discussing the more broad subject of his structure. Most of the essay is written about the present but he jumps periodically to his past. He uses this effect as a comparison between the past and the present. It shows mostly how his son is just like he was, but at the same time his son can be different. For instance they both snuck out on the boat, but he used a quiet oar while his son used an loud outboard motor. The time and culture differences seem to jump out to show some of the suttle differences time can cause. An example could be the switch of people from humming inboard motors to roaring outboard motors. I say these are suttle, but in this story they are everything. He uses the small differences to show how much the world has changed. It is easy to understand and apply the concept because the story is so realistically true. The essay was just a chronlogical story about a fishing trip, besides the occasional flashback of course. A very simple story used to show the importance of the observations made during different points in the authors life. He is able to bring it all together.That is one part of what makes this literature so great.…

    • 513 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays

Related Topics