A White Heron Essay

for an individual. During a rite of passage a person goes through three stages. The first

stage is separation. In this stage, the person is taken away from their home and familiar

surroundings this symbolizes the death of childhood. The second stage is the transition. This stage is a period of testing physically, mentally, or morally. This is to make sure the character is ready to enter into adulthood. The third and final stage is reincorporation. This is the stage where the character returns to their home with all of the privileges and responsibilities of an adult. In the story, A White Heron, the main character, Sylvia, goes through a rite of passage. She finds herself choosing between money and the trust of

. . .
She holds him very close to her being the only friend she’s ever known.

That night she sat with the heron and together they watched the sun come up. Sylvia looked beyond that and thought about what would be morally right. She finds something in the hunter she’s never had before, a friend. When she meets a hunter he asks her to show him where the white heron lives so he can stuff it and add it to his collection of birds. The next day Sylvia goes into the woods with the hunter in search of the bird.

The purpose of the rite of passage is to make sure a child is ready to enter into adulthood. The first test she takes is a physical test where she needs to climb a tree and then jump to another one to see if she can spot the heron. The way she felt about this test was described in this passage, “The way was harder than she thought; she must reach far and hold fast…”(123). Sylvia has learned that she won’t always have people telling her what she should do and that she needs to make her own decisions even if that means she has to do the opposite of what her friends and family ask her to do. She found the heron and was about to face her final test: whether she would tell the hunter or not. her grandmother or innocence and purity. Her reincorporation occurred that morning when she returned to her grandmother’s farm.

Common topics in this essay:
White Heron, Heron Essay, rite passage, white heron, ready enter adulthood, sylvia goes, herons secret, enter adulthood, tell herons, ready enter,

Approximate Word count = 562
Approximate Pages = 2 (250 words per page double spaced)

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