Summary Of Once More To The Lake By E. B White

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In Once More To The Lake By E.B White, the narrator’s is a father who is having an internal struggle to try to stay in the past but soon realizes that he can’t and death is inevitable. The narrator begins the story by explaining that his father rented a camp on a lake in Maine for one month when he was a kid, but not the narrator himself has a kid as he takes him to the same lake after years of not going to it. The narrator then creates an illusion from the second that he arrives to the camp. His illusion is that everything is the same as when he was younger, and because of that he himself isn’t getting older either. The reader see’s this illusion when the narrator says, “I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple …show more content…

There are few changes in the camp, but the few changes that there are huge to the narrator. These changes are little things, like the waitresses, the change in the number of paths, and the biggest change, the boats and thunderstorm. The waitresses are a big impact to the narrator, because they’re different than the waitresses that were there during his time. The change in the number of paths represents change, and that his options are starting to narrow, and the boats represents another change, and the fact that a person can’t reverse time, and the sound is reminding the author of death. His illusion shatters during the thunderstorm, the narrator says, “…The first feeling of oppression and heat and a general air around camp of not wanting to go very far away. In midafternoon (it was all the same) a curious darkening of the sky, and a lull in everything that had made life tick.” (White, 5) This is his realization that time has moved on, and he is getting older, and closer to death. Though the narrator tries to go back into denial and back into his illusion, and he does for a second, but he ends the illusion shatters for good, and we see this when the narrator says, “As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.” At that exact moment, is when the narrator understands that death is inevitable, and he realizes that he can’t escape