The teenage narrator (WB) of ‘The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant,’ and the narrator (Alice) in ‘Boys and Girls’ experience the journey to discovering their own identity. As they mature, they become accustomed to comfortable with their identity. WB struggled with whether to impress a girl or catch a rare big bass in the lake. Alice struggled on whether to conform to her family’s expectations and on what culture says or act out upon her morals. Reaching the end of both stories, both narrators comes to a realization, WB realizing how his passion is worth more than impressing a temporal girl, while Alice realizes that she is subconsciously conforming to her gender stereotype.

In the beginning of both stories, WB and Alice both had certain thoughts for their actions. WB thought that having a crush on Sheila was more important than his passion for basses: ‘only creature that seemed lovelier to me than a largemouth bass was Sheila Mant’, while Alice had certain thoughts on how she should morally act. WB would try to win Sheila’s attention by doing endless laps between his house and the Vermont shore, and he was excessively obsessed with her figure, spending his summer observing and looking at her. He thought that she was ’queenly and severe. Alice, on the other hand, was a naive girl who did not agree on what society told her to do.did not agree on what society tells her to do. Once when her grandmother came to her house to stay, her grandmother told her to be polite and dainty.