Once More To The Lake Analysis

E. B. Wight's central message of his essay, "Once More to the Lake" is how over the course of his vacation he was able to realize that while individual experiences at the lake had changed, the overall experience was the same, allowing him to finally connect with his son. Within the essay, E. B. Wight's character has a sudden desire to reinitiate a childhood tradition, what was once an annual trip to a Maine Lake, with his son who has had no such experience before. It is clear that Wight has found memories of the lake, "You remember one thing, and that suddenly reminds you of another thing. I guess I remembered clearest of all the early mornings, when the lake was cool and motionless, remembered how the bedroom smelled of the lumber it was made of and the wet woods whose scent entered through the screen,"(1) and clearly wants his son to have an identical situation, "I took along my son, who had never had any fresh water up his nose and who had seen lily pads only from train windows." …show more content…
These quotes set up the author's expectations for the vacation, specifically, how he wants his son to experience the same trip he once did as a kid by trying to recreate all of his nostalgia. This leads to to central problem of the essay, that the author gets too caught up in how things are compared to how they should be, that he misses the point of trying to connect to his son. The two sides of this dilemma can be seen as the author views himself as his own father, while also getting distressed by the minute differences from when he was young. There are many events that cause the author to feel like his own father, specifically when they first arrive and he, "began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father. This sensation persisted, kept cropping up all the time we were there. It was not an entirely new feeling, but in this setting it grew much