Once More To The Lake Analysis

Decent Essays
The essay “Once More To The Lake.”, by E.B White is one of the most compelling essays that I have ever read. At the beginning of the essay we meet White and his son taking a trip to the lake, this is the same lake that the author attended as a child. Throughout the essay you can see that the author is dealing with some inner demons of his own. This essay goes in a non-chronological order of how he daydreams back and forth through the present and the past. The main topic of this essay is that E.B is getting closer to that chapter in his life called death; he floats in and out of reality thinking about his life. Throughout the essay E.B has a hard time dealing with the comparison between him and his son. White suffers an identity crisis

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Perfectly captured in the title, the character being the unnamed narrator of this short story “Greasy Lake” by T. Coraghessan Boyle. This story follows the narrator though a series of unfortunate events where He and his friends Digby and Jeff attempt to exemplify the persona that they believe would be considered in accordance with a bad or “Greasy Character”. These three boys at their last teenage year as they spin there wheels in a June summer of 1960’s suburbia. Just as many small towns there was a shortage of social activities especially for teenagers so they fill there down time with sneaking around drinking and smoking. Succumbed by boredom the narrator decides to round up his gang and hop in the family station wagon and set off in search…

    • 1456 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In the book Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes a book to his son explaining how it is to live in America being black and it serves as a warning for later in his son’s life. Shows how he lived as a black person in America by personal, intellectual and historical experiences. He starts off by writing about his early live in which he grew up in a ghetto place, however, he says that he never picked up the way they acted. He grew up in Baltimore and people that live there were expected to grow up poor and marginalized they were loud and dressed a certain way to protect themselves and tell others coming from outside that they are humans too and living theirs he learned how to survive. Further on his life, he thought that school and…

    • 1937 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    Cornel West’s essay “On Black Fathering” clearly states what is needed to be a successful black father: first they have to overcome being dehumanized, second they must provide economically, psychologically and personally for their family, and finally they must also develop of who they are as a person (West 242). The main characters, Grange and Brownfield, in the novel The Third Life of Grange Copeland suffer through countless forms of hardships such as racism, extreme poverty, and living in dehumanizing conditions causing anger and bitterness from living under oppressive circumstances. From the oppression of the sharecroppers comes a hatred for the white landowners which inhibits their ability to raise a harmonious family. Throughout the novel, Grange fails to fulfill the role of being a father which cripples his son's ability to become a “good black father” as detailed within Cornel West’s essay “On Black Fathering”; only after he is able to grow himself is Grange is able to overcome his shortcomings as a father. Within the first section of West's essay On Black Fathering he clearly highlights the struggles that black fathers have to endure.…

    • 2001 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    What I Lived For Analysis

    • 1034 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Dante Alighieri once said, “There is no greater sorrow than to recall a happy time when miserable.” Though not directly mentioned, the idea of the quote seems to be explored thoroughly in both “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” by Henry David Thoreau, and “Once More to the Lake,” by E.B. White. While both of these authors float around several thoughts including reality, advancements, and living in general, they take very different approaches to do so. In “Once More to the Lake,” White reminisces on his journey back to a place he spent many summers as a child. His essay takes the form of a narrative, with him explaining in great detail the beauty and isolation of the lake.…

    • 1034 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Between the World and Me In the book, “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, he speaks about the world of the black society and the way the world viewed from their perspective. Coates, the author writes the book as a letter to his fifteen-year-old son, explaining to him about how he was not smart growing up in the streets of Baltimore and wanted to spread his knowledge he knows now compared to when he was a kid. Some of the knowledge he spoke about in the book was, how racism in the world plays a huge role in the way black people act and view the world through their eyes. For example, “blacks” not knowing what the “real world” of no racism is and “whites” asserting themselves as the dominant force.…

    • 744 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Overcoming Racism Theses: In Kiese Laymon’s How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America and Audre Lorde’s essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” they express moments of racism throughout each of their essays that connect the reader to the reality of racism being a current issue that is still problematic. #1 Body #1-Laymon Main idea In Laymon’s “Prologue: We Will Never Ever Know: Letters to Uncle Jimmy,” he gets an important mental note about his blackness from Uncle in his last words before he died.…

    • 1368 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Baldwin Uncle Analysis

    • 706 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Struggling to write a persuasive, yet a perfect paper to his nephew, Baldwin, the uncle gives him an insight of the unjust suffering both his father and the grandfather have encountered by the Whites, and how he should overcome racism in America. Before the grandfather died, of who Baldwin had never met before, he believed so much of what the Whites said about him that he carried on the grief and defeat in his heart, which is part of the reason why he died. On the other hand, the father, who used to laugh a lot as a child, now shed invisible tears because of what society had done to him. The uncle acknowledged that the Whites had destroyed many of the Blacks’ lives and that they would never be forgiven for their actions. He also acknowledged…

    • 706 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Grow Of Tradition Analysis

    • 1927 Words
    • 8 Pages

    Arike Jacobs The Marrow of Tradition: Lynching and “Justice” When discussing American history it is near impossible to ignore the centuries of racial tension. The Marrow of Tradition by Charles W. Chesnutt exposes the social pathology of the American South that has normalized the brutalization of black bodies. Chesnutt writes of various lives both black and white in the events that lead up to a race riot similar to the Wilmington Massacre of 1898.…

    • 1927 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Throughout the piece he plays upon various dualities, most stemming from his inability to distinguish himself from his son. He writes that upon seeing his son fishing, he felt as though “it was [his] hands that held the rod, [his] eyes watching… and [that he] didn’t know which rod [he] was at the end of.” This juxtaposition allows him to simultaneously describe the philosophies of childhood and adulthood — the younger content with the experience at hand, the older wishing to relive experiences lost, and thus losing the ones in the present. He continues to emphasize this difference in outlooks and resultant discrepancies in appreciating the present through verb tense. White reflects that there “had been jollity and peace and goodness” and continues to employ the past tense when describing his experiences at the lake.…

    • 1002 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    As an African American in the still very racist 60’s era, Harlem writer James Baldwin finds it imperative to write a letter to his nephew James, in which he forewarns and advice’s his still highly naïve nephew of the oppressive and ignorant America that he is destined to grow up in. While he cautions young James of the harsh and crude realities of the era, Baldwin prompts his nephew to not succumb to the stereotypes and expectancies of the white American man. Through the use of various rhetorical combinations Baldwin not only appeals to the emotional, logistical and credible senses of his audience, but by infusing Sturken’s concepts of memory and cultural products, he makes this historical piece of prose relevant to the 21st century by retelling…

    • 1096 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Billy Collins’ poem, “The Art of Drowning,” describes to the reader how one’s death is insignificant to the rest of society. Through the sarcastic tone and rhetorical questions, the speaker informs the reader that life will go on after one’s death, and that the act of death flashing before one’s eyes is not a real experience; death is much simpler than that. In stanza one, the speaker presents his or her thoughts on death by saying “I wonder how it all got started, this business about seeing your life flash before your eyes while you drown…” The reader easily recognizes this common phrase about death, and is aware of the speaker’s skepticism of the concept of life flashing before one’s eyes during death.…

    • 511 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Richard Wright’s African American literature expresses the theme of exploring black identity(World Book Discover, 2015). Richard Wright wrote many popular books with this theme in mind including Native Son and Black Boy. Wright lived in a time of racial segregation which greatly affected his work and views on the American Dream (Galens et al. ,2001). The American Dream is the idea that every US citizen should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative. Richard Wright condemns the idea of the American Dream in his books Native Son , Black Boy, and Uncle Tom 's Children that expresses African American’s struggles as well as his own struggles through racial conflicts, whites…

    • 1326 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    E.B White and Richard Rodriguez are both accomplished writers with the particular ability to examine and simplify some of the most complex concepts. White’s “Once More to the Lake,” and Rodriguez’s The Hunger of Memory analyzes another perplexing notion: identity. Though they both agree that a person’s identity is molded by their experiences and circumstances, White uses his childhood memories, relationships, and extensive figurative language to describe his identity, while Rodriguez takes a much more simplistic and pessimistic approach. Identity is what defines a person; what makes that person unique. “Once More to the Lake” claims that identity is the culmination of memories made over a lifetime.…

    • 931 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Once more to the Lake, by E.B. white, is a personal narrative that allows the readers to slip into the shoes of E.B. White and relive the memories he had with a lake in Maine. This personal narrative theme is more illusive, going back in time where E.B. White lived in delight as a kid who visited a same lake each summer. E.B White reflects his childhood memories when he took his son to the same lake that he grew to love. These reflections and memories are both pleasurable and saddening as he realizes nothing has changed. E.B. White uses figurative language that allows him to express his feelings as he relives the memories he once had as a child.…

    • 801 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Other Side of The River, by Alex Kotlowitz, is a story about a young black boy, Eric McGinnis, who was found dead near the river. Throughout the novel, the reader is given the chance to analyze the different perspective of social audiences on how Eric McGinnis died. We see the views of the citizens of both sides of the river, formal and informal audiences. The river, which splits the two cities, Benton Harbor and St. Joseph, symbolizes for the union that is forced upon two cities, regardless of the different social status, race, and poverty they may have.…

    • 783 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays