The Symbolism In In The Lake Of The Woods

The lake itself plays a major role throughout the story, as it mirrors the characters almost exactly. For example, the lake is described as being “fetid and

The discovery of the biker’s body is the turning point in not only the story, but also in the narrator’s life. In a short time, he has been beaten, has knocked out someone with a tire iron, almost raped a woman, found a dead body, and watched his mother’s Bel Air station wagon be destroyed. Which was all done for the rush of excitement. While hiding in the water that was previously seen as a tarn of doom, with all the nights occurrences spinning in his head, he has an epiphany. Standing there he realizes what becomes of “tough-guys” and discovers that he has found his salvation within his true self. Accordingly, as the narrator emerges from Greasy Lake, he is a new person with a newly discovered perspective. As the sun is rising and the songs of birds replace the sounds of crickets, he leaves the pool of once dismal waters (Boyle 118). This signals his rebirth and his baptism as a reformed adolescent.

This may represent her helplessness as she tries to struggle to save herself from him as well as implying that she is yet again underwater. It also represents all the things she hated about their marriage and election that she kept secret from John. Thus, John's numerous references to beneath the water, imagination and Kathy peering up from below enforces the possibility the lake containing her body.

In the Lake of the Woods is a fictional mystery written by Tim O'Brien. Through the book we learn that our lovers, husbands, and wives have qualities beyond what our eyes can see. John Wade and Kathy are in a marriage so obscure that their secrets lead to an emotional downfall. After John Wade loss in his Senatorial Campaign, his feeling towards Kathy take on a whole different outlook. His compulsive and obsessive behavior causes Kathy to distance herself from him. His war experience and emotional trauma are a major cause for his strange behavior. We remain pondering about Kathy's mysterious disappearance, which becomes fatal for her. Possible scenarios are presented in eight

“Once More to the Lake” is a short essay written by E.B. White for his column in the New Yorker, One Man’s Meat. “Once More to the Lake” is a story about a father who is taking his son to his childhood vacation spot. On the trip, the father finds himself inside the memories of his past. Throughout the trip, the father finds differences in the lake from when he was a child. While much of E.B. White 's essay is set in the present, the author explores his own mortality as he looks both to the past and to the future.

The author symbolizes the water as transition and spirituality, the lake is symbolized as the elusive badness the boys want so badly. The narrator notices that none of them are as bad as they try to act. After that night the narrator realizes he cannot make it in that life, rather the narrator wants to go to the safety and security of his home and parents.

The characters in “Greasy Lake” can be viewed in different lights. The narrator and his two friends, Digby and Jeff, are three mean boys whose lives seem to be centered around getting drunk and high from dusk until dawn. The narrator praises Digby and Jeff for their slick and dangerous lifestyles. Their skills consist of dancing, drinking, and “rolling a joint as compact as a Tootsie Roll Pop stick” (65) while on a bumpy drive. These characters scream trouble. They seem like harmless teenagers out to have a good time but it can be interpreted that these characters will attract mischief. After a night of bar-hopping, dancing, eating, drinking, and smoking, they decide to continue the party with a bottle of gin on the shores of broken glass and charred wood. These characters can be interpreted as young, naive, wild, reckless fools. The decisions these kids have been making the entire night have not been good ones. They have driven to bar after bar, consuming drink after drink. Obviously, their decision making is impaired. The reader should realize that the road the boys are travelling on is one that leads to a bad place. It is a place that has everything to do with Greasy Lake. It’s a place where dangerous things happen. The allegorical element that is found in the boys is

John's life seemed to be one major drama after another; he didn't have a good male role model as a kid, and it seems he never was able to get on track. What was amazing about his life was the number of problems that he seemed to get into and how he wriggled out of them (with the help of a friendly person who just happened to meet him) only to run into more problems.

Imagery, detail, and symbolism play a crucial role in this work. Imagery has the function of painting a picture of the situation in the reader’s mind so that he or she is able to develop a version of the story individually. It makes the reading a more personalized experience that helps the reader to understand what’s going on. When O’Brien was just about to escape to Canada to avoid being drafted, he described the scene that was presented in front of him. “The shoreline was dense with brush and timber. I could see tiny red berries on the bushes.” In this quote, the reader can visualize the setting of the lake where he has to make his life-changing decision. It appeals to the visual sense by describing the shoreline and even the sense of

Greasy Lake is described by the narrator as an aura of possessiveness and suspense to the average reader. However, while somewhat stereotypical, the narrator and his friends see the lake as the most ideal location to get together on late nights. This can be translated as the beginning of setting a scene for a location in which the adolescent youth can meet, with the reference to Bruce Springsteen’s words from a song that opens the story: “It’s about a mile down on the dark side of Route 88” (Boyle, 125). The words from the song create a scene of how the youth had essentially treated the lake as their own place. The image is further made clear when the faint island in the middle of the lake is described as “a single ravaged island a hundred yards from

Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods is centered around the mysterious disappearance of Kathy Wade. Mysterious is the key word, as throughout the novel O’Brien plays with the fine line between ambiguity and reality. Kathy’s husband John Wade, the main character, is a Vietnam veteran and former politician whose participation in the infamous Mai Lai Massacre caused his fall from grace. Following a landslide defeat in the congressional elections, Kathy and John retreat to solitude in an isolated cabin in the Minnesota woods. Here, O’Brien highlights the stress that secrecy has had on their relationship. During their retreat, Kathy disappears in the middle of the night. Their boat is missing, but there are no other clues. O’Brien does

It was at one time, but not when the speaker and his friends were at it. “The Indians had called it Wakan, a reference to the clarity of its waters. Not it was fetid and murky, the mud banks glittering with broken glass and strewn beer cans and the charred remains of bonfires” (1). In a way, the lake represents the speaker. At one time (before the night he spent at greasy lake), he was like the lake. He was free of litter and garbage. He was clear and pure. After the night at the lake, the speaker was changed. He experienced what fear really was. He also learned what “being bad” was all about. He let go of his innocence. His childhood was over after the night at the lake. He was a man. He was a man who committed a

In the novel In The Lake Of The Woods, Tim O’Brien accentuates a mystery about the nature of love. Love is a general term, therefore, it is a mystery itself. Love captures the secrecy and frustration in John and Kathy Wade, a married couple that met in college. They are both depressed, yet continue to imagine themselves in situations where they would be happy together. One night, Kathy takes out the boat and goes missing on the Lake on the Woods. John, as well as other residents of Minnesota, spend days looking for her. The hypothesis, narrator, and evidence accounts form their own ideas about what happened to her, such as Patricia S. Hood saying that Kathy “tried...Way too hard,” and Richard Thinbill saying that “it probably haunted John too, except he tried to do something about it.” (O’Brien, 258) Questions cannot be answered because, like love, Kathy’s mystery cannot be solved. O’Brien conveys this throughout the book as well as proving there are different beliefs when it comes to the nature of love, therefore, there is not just one answer to the mystery.

The lake is the imperfect part about the house. It is sad to see the fish floating around there, almost unconscious. Harvey has just found out about the lake and goes to check it out. Barker Narrates“gloomy and dreary both the lake and the dark stones around it covered with a film of green scum. ” (23). The lake creates mood. It is described so well that the perfect house is imperfect, because of this one setting in the house. The lake continues to make the holiday house more unwelcoming and more gloomy and sad. Hood dives into the lake after his coat and gets sucked into the lake. Barker Says “he was drawn into the white waters at the whirlpool's heart,” (120) The lake has ended the conflict, created a happy moment when The Vampire King dies. Hood has no heart, which technically makes him not alive. If he can be sucked into the whirlpool’s heart, does the lake kill him?The lake can create happy and sad moments. The lake is a small setting of the story, but it is also where all the conflict ends. The lake is important because it is the imperfect of the perfect