Through The Tunnel Symbolism

Jerry, a risk taking eleven-year-old boy, decided to go to the massive rocks one summer day. When he asked his mother, she was extremely nervous about letting her son go that far out; however, she said yes to him nervously. When he swam out to the bay which held the rocks, he saw couple of older boys jumping off the rocks and going through a tunnel in the rock which was underwater. To prove that he was old enough to hang with them, he faced the challenge on learning how to hold his breath long enough to through the tunnel without making it out alive. Did Jerry make it back in time? In this short story “Through the Tunnel”, the author Doris Lessing uses characterization, point of view, and symbolism to illustrate how life-changing impacts form

The author uses symbolism to add depth of meaning to what otherwise be regular, ordinary, and places. To Jerry the beach symbolizes peace, calm, and normal. He characterizes it as a small place for children, a place where his mother might lie safe in the sand. “…It was a torment to him to waste a day of his careful training, but he stayed with her on that other beach, which now seemed a place for small children, a place where his mother might lie safe in the sun. It was not his beach.”. (30) It is important to him because he wants to show he is not a little kid anymore, he is as big as the big kids and can fit right into him. The bay symbolizes danger, risk taking, and something new. “As for Jerry, once he saw that his mother had gained her beach, he began the steep descent to the bay. From where he was, high up among red-brown rocks, it was a scoop of moving bluish green fringed with white. As he went lower, he saw that spread among small promontories and inlets of rough, sharp rock, and the crisping, lapping surface showed stains of purple and darker blue. Finally, as he ran sliding and scraping down the last few yards, he saw an edge of white surf and the shallow, luminous movement of water over white sand, and, beyond that, a solid, heavy blue.”. (7) The symbolic of the beach and the bay is the supposed to represent child to manhood. Childhood is calm and sweet while manhood is rough and dangerous. The tunnel symbolizes the pathway from childhood to adult hood. It shows the struggle that you have to go through to prove you are more mature then before. The characteristics in the story that makes if where it is appropriate for this, “He was at the end of what he could do. He looked up at the crack as if it were filled with air and not water, as if he could put his mouth to it to draw in air. A hundred and fifteen, he heard himself say inside