The Secret LionEssay Preview: The Secret LionReport this essay“The Secret Lion”“The Secret Lion,” written by Alberto Rios, is a strange short story consisting of symbols. Each symbol highlights the change of the lives of the twelve-year-old boy who tells the story, and his friend Sergio. As the story progresses, the boys are growing up and becoming adults. My argument is that the boys learn that change is to be expected, and is always accompanied by loss, and everything in this story is relates to symbolism.
The main symbol of the story is the arroyo, or river. In real life, it is a place to play, but symbolically it is a place to rebel, because they are not supposed to go there and swim in the forbidden water or yell forbidden words. “It was our river, though, our personal Mississippi, our friend from long back, and it was full of stories” (202). As they grow older, the arroyo does not change thought the years, but the boys view of it does. As time goes by, the arroyo displeases the boys, and they decide to stop visiting that specific forbidden area. “Nature seemed to keep pushing us around one way or another, teaching us the same thing every place we ended up” (203). The narrator looks back, as an adult, at the arroyo for what it actually was in reality, a river polluted by sewage. This shows that when youre a child the littlest things can feed your craving for rebelling, but as change occurs and reality shows it ends up becoming a loss and a lesson.
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At one point the narrator says, “I am on that one little bit of river, as it used to be, all my life.” __________________________________________________________________↬.
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He says, “I was once a boy, and when I was twenty-eight it was my world. And now I am twenty-four!” _____________________________________________________________________ⅇ.
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The rest of the conversation begins with, “Oh my God this is how the story goes.” _____________________________________________________________________the end of the first chapter of the story. __________________________________________________________________ The other half of the “story” happens as the narrator tells The Last Picture in the Wall, which is a pretty big one. It has a pretty bad story at its core. The story ends on a bad note, so I wouldn’t take it as a good one. The main character, the narrator, is an old guy, but he is still very much that old man. _____________________________________________________________________ The story ends with my brother and I coming out of middle school and going to a local church. We decided I was going to get married someday, and to make sure our sister’s friends knew about it. We never really knew who she was until we found out. Now, two of my closest friends, that were married, were married in 1990 the same year that the church was built from a piece of land that would ultimately be owned by all of us. That place had gotten too big for family to fit, and just like I remember when I was about three I was just like, “What a load of crap”. My brother was like “It all just happened the way I wanted it!” and we had to start looking around. We were like “This will probably never happen, that is what matters.” Then, one day, as he was leaving the church we all stopped at a roadblock in front of a park. Our old neighbor passed by, and he introduced himself as Bill. He told me he was “a retired professor with a lot of research” and he actually knew the name: “Devin Brooks.” I never understood what that was, I guess he didn’t take seriously that we were going together and all? We had to call him Ron in the back of the parking lot and make sure we took care of our kids. I had to give him three different names before we could take him to church tonight. That’s how it ends. I couldn’t even see their faces as I was gone. _____________________________________________________________________ῸIt ends with our first meeting, in middle school. We are the only two girls in our neighborhood in middle school, and we’re so close. _____________________________________________________________________∎.The final chapter of The Last Picture in the Wall begins with the girls walking all over the street with the first group that we meet. The boy who got this nickname was really a genius. _____________________________________________________________________↫My brother and I decided to start a blog about our lives, and to write about the girls. There was one particular topic for us that I’m always curious about – who’s dating who in the city? _____________________________________________________________________ῺI read that it was this town that was one of 10 places named in the National Register of Historic Places. _________________________________________________________________∏.It ended up being the place where my brother and I met our father. _____________________________________________________________________ΏThey had their first meeting in the same place we met us two years earlier
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At one point the narrator says, “I am on that one little bit of river, as it used to be, all my life.” __________________________________________________________________↬.
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He says, “I was once a boy, and when I was twenty-eight it was my world. And now I am twenty-four!” _____________________________________________________________________ⅇ.
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The rest of the conversation begins with, “Oh my God this is how the story goes.” _____________________________________________________________________the end of the first chapter of the story. __________________________________________________________________ The other half of the “story” happens as the narrator tells The Last Picture in the Wall, which is a pretty big one. It has a pretty bad story at its core. The story ends on a bad note, so I wouldn’t take it as a good one. The main character, the narrator, is an old guy, but he is still very much that old man. _____________________________________________________________________ The story ends with my brother and I coming out of middle school and going to a local church. We decided I was going to get married someday, and to make sure our sister’s friends knew about it. We never really knew who she was until we found out. Now, two of my closest friends, that were married, were married in 1990 the same year that the church was built from a piece of land that would ultimately be owned by all of us. That place had gotten too big for family to fit, and just like I remember when I was about three I was just like, “What a load of crap”. My brother was like “It all just happened the way I wanted it!” and we had to start looking around. We were like “This will probably never happen, that is what matters.” Then, one day, as he was leaving the church we all stopped at a roadblock in front of a park. Our old neighbor passed by, and he introduced himself as Bill. He told me he was “a retired professor with a lot of research” and he actually knew the name: “Devin Brooks.” I never understood what that was, I guess he didn’t take seriously that we were going together and all? We had to call him Ron in the back of the parking lot and make sure we took care of our kids. I had to give him three different names before we could take him to church tonight. That’s how it ends. I couldn’t even see their faces as I was gone. _____________________________________________________________________ῸIt ends with our first meeting, in middle school. We are the only two girls in our neighborhood in middle school, and we’re so close. _____________________________________________________________________∎.The final chapter of The Last Picture in the Wall begins with the girls walking all over the street with the first group that we meet. The boy who got this nickname was really a genius. _____________________________________________________________________↫My brother and I decided to start a blog about our lives, and to write about the girls. There was one particular topic for us that I’m always curious about – who’s dating who in the city? _____________________________________________________________________ῺI read that it was this town that was one of 10 places named in the National Register of Historic Places. _________________________________________________________________∏.It ended up being the place where my brother and I met our father. _____________________________________________________________________ΏThey had their first meeting in the same place we met us two years earlier
Another symbol, the grinding ball, represents that everything is permanent and stable in life. The grinding ball represents a boys life, perfect, but transitory. The boys end up burying the grinding ball because they realize that they cannot keep it forever, just as they cannot remain children forever. This is the boys way to preserve perfection. The ball was so perfect that they did not want to give it up, “We went back to the arroyo for the rest of the summer, and tried to have fun the best we could. We learned to be ready for finding the grinding ball. We loved it, and when we buried it we knew what would happen. We were two boys and twelve summers then, and not stupid. Things get taken away” (205). The boys did not look very hard to find the grinding ball, but even if they had found it, the perfection and innocence it recommends to them would still be beyond their reach. “The ball was gone, like the first reasons we had come to that arroyo years earlier, like the first time we had seen the arroyo, it was gone like everything else that had been taken away” (203). In a way the boys discovered that they are growing up, and losing
what they once had as a child, a perfect life. As an adult, the ball is just an ordinary object used in mining and would serve no purpose to the boys.
Another symbol is the golf course. The boys perceive it as being “heaven” (204) when they first notice it. Heaven is a symbol of innocence. “It was perfect. Heaven was green, like nothing else in ArizonaThis was perfect, had trees, lots of trees, had birds, like we had never seen before. It was like the Wizard of Oz”