Critical Summary

In the short story “Once More to the Lake,” E.B. White uses elements such as diction, similes, and imagery to convey a message to the audience that the lake with which he was once very familiar as a child has not changed, and he seems to be reliving his past with his own son. E.B. White begins the passage by recalling old memories with his father at a lake in Maine. He reminisced about the lake and the serenity it offered him and other campers when he was a child. This “holy spot” has then become a traditional summer vacation for him and his family. After settling down in a camp, White realizes everything was left the same since his last visit to the lake. “I could tell it was going to be pretty much the same as it had been left before -- I knew it, lying in bed for the first morning, smelling the bedroom and hearing the boy sneak quietly out and go off along the shore in a boat. I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was in my father.” By engaging in simple activities such as picking up boxes or laying down a table fork, White feels he is living a dual existence. By reiterating everything his father and White did, it seems that he is living his childhood over again.

(style) White’s description of the cabins at the lake provides the first example of his focus on details, and this initiates his confusion of the present experience with the past. He writes that he remembered most clearly “the early mornings, when the lake was cool and motionless, remembered how the bedroom smelled of the lumber it was made of and the wet woods whose scent entered through the screen”. His boyhood habit of rising early and taking to the lake ties the present to the past as he hears his son do the same. In the mornings long ago, he would be the first one up and “would dress softly so as not to wake the others, and sneak out into the sweet outdoors and start out in the canoe, keeping close along the shore in the long shadows of the pines . . . being very careful never to rub the paddle against the gunwale for fear of disturbing the stillness of the cathedral”. And on this return, he knew that it was “going to be pretty much the same as it had been before . . . lying in bed the first morning smelling the bedroom and hearing the boy sneak quietly out and go off along the shore in a boat”. White’s description emphasizes the sensuous qualities of this natural world and the common response of children to it.

(voice) In White's mind, the lake being the most prominent piece of nature is his possession,