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Doe Season Symbolism

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“Doe Season” is a short story written by David Michael Kaplan. David Michael Kaplan was born in 1946 in New York. He started his writing career in 1985 with his first novel Skating in the Dark, and wrote “Doe Season” in 1987. He is identified in the writing community as a magical realist and receives most of his influence from magical realist elements like interweaving magical elements with detailed, realistically drawn “everyday” setting. Kaplan wrote this book as a coming of age story of a girl starting to become a woman. This is a critical analysis of the short story “Doe Season” by observing and identifying different key elements within the story. The main characters in this story are Andy, Andy’s father, and Andy’s mother. Andy is a young …show more content…

The title “Doe Season” could be translated to the female time. Doe meaning female and season meaning time. The female time is symbolic because it refers to Andy and how it is almost the end of her innocence, or childhood, and the beginning of becoming a women. Another piece of important symbolism in this story are the woods. To Andy, the woods symbolize safety. Andy knows the woods and is comfortable in the woods. When Andy is running in the woods from the dead doe she start to hear the sounds of the ocean, this symbolizes her leaving her innocence, and her comfort and going towards womanhood, the unknown that is the ocean. The ocean reminds her of her mother when her top came off in the ocean and she saw her mother’s breasts. She knows that one day she will also have breast like her mothers and will become a women, but this is unknown, scary area for Andy. During the second night after Andy shot the doe, she has a dream. In her dream there is an instance where Andy "pressed deeper, through flesh and muscle and sinew, until her whole hand and more was inside the wound and she had found the doe's heart". This symbolizes the guilt that Andy has from shooting the doe. The doe symbolizes Andy’s innocence and by killing the doe she feels that innocence is gone and that is transitioning into adulthood. She come to this scary realization this near the end of the story and runs

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