The Secret Lion: Exploring Symbolism in Growing Up
The short story "The Secret Lion" tells the tale of two boys trying to maintain their childhood while dealing with the difficulties that come with approaching puberty. The way the author presents the two characters brings out their innate curiosity and sense of adventure, which they attempt to explore while at school. The two discover on their journey around the globe that they are unable to completely satisfy their needs, and each time they appear to have the fundamentals of life backwards. There is a usage of symbolism throughout the story, and the author does not express the ideas vividly but instead considers the use of symbols. In Alberto Alvaro Rios short story titled The Secret Lion, the author characteristically uses symbolism as a literary device to express the challenges that the two major characters faced growing up in their environment.
Symbols of Oppression and Freedom
The first consideration is the use of symbols to describe how the boys felt oppressed by the system and how they finally found freedom after school. The daily routine exercise is presented as a boring schedule or the two because they have to go to the classroom every morning and get into a class where they would not understand anything that was taught. Instead, they would only be seeing girls but again, they could not relate to them in many ways because they were in the school environment that did not condone such behavior. The author writes, "We would come home from school on the bus, put our books away, change shoes, and go across the street to the arroyo. It was the one place we were not supposed to go. So we did" (Rios 1). The impression that the reader gets from this excerpt is that of two boys who were enjoying doing something that they were not supposed to engage in the first place. It means, therefore, that the word "arroyo" is used in the short story to describe the experience of freedom that the boys felt in the end.
Imperfection in Life
An alternative way of describing the use of symbolism in the exploration of the life challenges that the boys felt was in the context of how it made the two boys realize that life is imperfect. It is a hard moment for the two when they have to balance their complicated lives full of rules to the desire to have a freedom of their own. It is in this sense that the author decides to include the element of symbolism to be used in the context of how life is imperfect but they had to live by the rules regardless of the situation. A significant instance where this feature is relevant is in the consideration of the grinding ball that the boys thought was perfect but realized that just like anything else, it was not. The author writes, "And we came back the next week to did it up and, we didn't know, pass it around some more or something, but we didn't find it. We dug up the whole bank and we never found it again. We tried" (Rios 2). The impression that the reader gets is that while the children thought that they had finally landed on something that constitutes a perfect object, they realized that it went missing still. The assumption was that the grinding ball was used as an object to mark symbolism and which was critical to the boy's perception of life. In the end, they got it wrong again just as they had done many other times in the past.
The Struggle for Paradise
It is also worth highlighting that the author focuses on the use of symbols in expressing the boys' frustration at the fact that they had not reached heaven as they thought. The struggle to meet life's adventures is a huge challenge for the two boys and which necessitates the need to look for areas where they could have fun and forget about their stressors in life. It is then that the idea to visit the fountains comes up ad they set out. They have to make sacrifices along the way and they tire so much that they became feeble. However, they never lost focus as they thought their journey to heaven was on course. Thus, at noon, the two had gone to the hill and they found heaven. To the boy, the symbol is from the notion of heaven, which was used as a representative of the ultimate paradise that they had been desiring throughout their life course. The author writes, "Perfect. Heaven was green, like nothing else in Arizona. And it wasn't a cemetery or like that because we had seen cemeteries and they had gravestones and stuff and this didn't. This was perfect, had trees, lots of trees, had birds, like we had never seen before" (Rios 3). As it turns out, they had just visiting a golf course and it was not the heaven they thought it was. It creates the impression of people who were determined to live life to the fullest but every time they were close to it, they were returned to the default states where they would then get a better picture of what life entailed.
In Conclusion
In summary, the author stylistically uses symbolism in selected parts of the story to express the boys' frustrations the fact that they had to live life different from what they anticipated. It appeared to them that the life they were leading was imperfect and that the ball constituted perfection but it did not as they misplaced it later. Furthermore, the symbolism of paradise and heaven turned out to be sour when the golf house layers came along and demanded to use the facility they once thought was heaven. It is also worth describing that arroyo itself is symbolic in the sense that the author uses it to describe the two boys delight at freedom. However, the theme of the paper stands that the life they wished for was difficult to come by and it becomes apparent that from the start to the finish, the boys struggle with their childhood.
Works Cited
Rios, Alberto Alvaro. “The Secret Lion.” n. pag. Print.
