Once More To The Lake E. B White Analysis

Children and adults rarely see eye to eye when it comes to differences in the past and present. This is because the idea of innovation is perceived differently by individual generations. In the essay “Once More to the Lake” the author E.B. White struggles with the concept of change, while his son accepts the concept of progress when returning to a family lake house. Through the use of imagery and symbolism the essay conveys how the men see the same place differently.

White’s son observes the adjustments at the lake house as improvements. Since White’s son is staying at the camp for the first time, he had never witnessed what it was like previously when White himself was young. In one passage, White uses imagery to describe the type of boat motor he grew up with, and the type that his son is growing up. “They were one-cylinder and two-cylinder engines, and some were make-and-break, and some were jump-spark...My boy loved our rented outboard, and his great desire was to achieve single handed mastery over it,” to White’s son, the brand new outboard motors are a vast improvement to the one or two-cylinder engines that his father once used. Therefore the changes that

Considering that he has experienced the camp before the modern world diluted it’s old-world feel, White has a difficult time accepting the differences at the lake. In another passage, White uses symbolism to reminisce upon the days when he was young, “Outside, the road was tarred...Inside, all was just as it had always been, except there was more Coca-cola and not so much Moxie and root beer and birch beer and sarsaparilla.” White uses the the store as a symbol to describe the changes that have taken place at the lake. He describes that they no longer have certain products because of larger businesses taking over and changing the aura of the store. He also uses the tarr to symbolize the modernization of the old roads surrounding the