Conflict In E. B. White's Once More To The Lake

People live, they age, and then they die. Somewhere, in the middle, adults question all the choices they’ve made, all the heart breaks, and endless memories that are embedded in their minds. God made us to live and to die, but when E.B White faces death he turns to the memories of when he was a little boy. Dual existence, internal conflict, and the experience of nature are social attitudes revealed toward loss of identity, fear, and vulnerability in “Once more to the Lake”. E.B White struggles mainly with dual existence between him and his son. White takes his son to his favorite lake where he grew up with his father. White is conflicted when he realizes he does not see his son but instead see’s himself. “There had been no years between the

This is a major reoccurring theme throughout White’s writing. Whites conflict is that he wants to much to relive the past instead of the present. White is facing a dilemma known as man verses himself. He is fighting with himself mentally, not being able to let go of the past. “I kept remembering everything, lying in bed in the mornings-the small steamboat that had a long rounded stern like the lip of a Ubangi, how quietly she ran on the moonlight sails, when the older boys played their mandolins and the girls sang and we ate doughnuts dipped in sugar, and how sweet the music was on the water in the shrining night and what it had felt like to think about girls then” (White). In this moment White wants to be his son, he wants to feel the joy of when he was a little boy with his father on the boat. White and his father went to the lake as if it was a religion they practiced, and now he is bringing his own son to inherit the same ritual. White fights with his emotions of being in nostalgia, but when he notices little changes in the motor of the boat he immediately comes out of his memories. “The only thing that was wrong now, really, was the sound of the place, an unfamiliar nervous sound of the outboard motors.”(White). White remembered every little detail of the boat he rode with his father, but now, there was a new sound, and that sound was ruthless enough for White to change his thinking of the memories he once had. Fear and vulnerability all of a sudden start to take over his mind. Every unfamiliar element of the lake brings him back to reality and reminds him that he is no longer that little boy. White anticipates that as the lake changes he has also changed himself. Whites fear is by the time his son has aged the lake will be completely different. The lake will no longer be the place he once knew. White misses how America use to be; because technology has changed the country dramatically, nothing was how he had