Once More To The Lake Analysis

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"Everywhere we went I had trouble making out which was I, the one walking at my side, the one walking in my pants." (White, 184). It is hard to assimilate and get accustom to the life of an adult. The responsibilities, the loss of freedom and the end to the adventures youth offers it's what makes the transition to adulthood so hard. In the essay Once More to the Lake, White describes his struggle between being a man and wanting to be a boy. He is not able to connect with the man he has become; he lives in his old childhood memories of his trips to the lake. Furthermore, White cannot connect to his role as a father because he misses his childhood. "I 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... I would be saying something and suddenly it would be not I but my father who was saying the words or making the gestures. It gave me a creepy sensation," (White, 180). The responsibilities that the author has now remind him of his father because he is now very much like him. …show more content…

I felt dizzy and didn't know which rod I was at the end of," (White, 181). The author has a hard time letting go of his old past and live as an adult in the present. I feel that he urges for the freedom and adventures he used to get when he was a little boy. He wants to feel and enjoy things in the same manner a child would. It seems that he does not feel ready to move on and take his place as the man of his household, but instead looks for the child he used to be within his own son. Moreover, he does not want to accept that he has grown old and in a way he has become his father. The trip to the lake awakes intense emotions that provokes him to think back to his childhood and makes him realize that his is no longer that little boy, but a father with

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