27 pages • 54 minutes read
Alberto Alvaro RiosThe Secret Lion
Fiction | Short Story | YA | Published in 1984A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Loss of Innocence
“The Secret Lion” centers on the loss of childhood innocence, but the disillusionment that the narrator and his friend undergo is multilayered and occurs in stages. The story opens with a fairly typical coming-of-age storyline: The narrator describes the difficult transition from elementary school to junior high, focusing on his relationships to both adults and his peers. Without the focused attention of one teacher throughout the school day, he feels “personally abandoned somehow” (98). This feeling is part of growing up and having more responsibilities, as junior high students are expected to attend to various subjects without the oversight of a single authority figure. In addition, his relationships with girls change. He is confused by the fact that the girls he has known all of his life, his next-door neighbors, are suddenly different to him, and he struggles to understand his own budding attraction to them.
The narrator is at best ambivalent about the approach of adolescence. His trips to the arroyo with Sergio include shouted statements “about girls, and all the things [they] wanted to do with them” (99), but the action itself is boyish, and the friends seem aware that these visits are the last gasp of childhood: “We went back to the arroyo for the rest of the summer, and tried to have fun the best that we could. […] We were two boys and twelve summers then, and not stupid. Things get taken away” (102). The symbol of the grinding ball develops this ambivalence about growing up. Enchanted by its perfect roundness, the narrator is loath to bring it home, afraid that his mother will make him throw it away. The grinding ball represents his childhood; when he and Sergio decide to bury the ball, it is a figurative attempt to preserve their youth.
Notably, however, the narrator and Sergio respond to the loss of the ball with acceptance, even recognizing that they buried it knowing that they would never recover it. This speaks to the much more dramatic loss of innocence they have already undergone by the time they find the ball. Prior to the boys’ discovery of the golf course, they think and act in ways that are, though typical of their young age, quite naive. They view the nearby hills as “mountains” and imagine that they might conceal “bridges and castles” (101). They confidently prepare for a journey into the hills, but the things they pack are unnecessary and impractical. When they finally see the golf course, they decide not only that it is heaven, but also that this beautiful green oasis was made for them, highlighting the egotistical nature of youth: “It was like The Wizard of Oz, like when they got to Oz and everything was so green, so emerald” (102). Their expulsion from this figurative Garden of Eden is therefore doubly shattering. The discovery that the place they’ve found is merely a golf course replaces fantasy with mundane reality. The realization that they aren’t wanted there abruptly introduces them to class divisions: The course was not designed with them in mind, and now they’ve entered a world in which they are unwelcome.
The story about the golf course recontextualizes the narrator’s earlier anxieties about growing up. His fears are not simply responses to the unknown world of adolescence; rather, they reflect firsthand understanding of what one can lose in gaining knowledge.
The Reality of Class Differences
The story implies that the narrator and Sergio come from lower- or working-class families. When they discover the greenness of the golf course, they immediately recognize it as a symbol of wealth and status, but it is clear that they do not belong to this group. It’s also clear that the idea of class is mostly an abstraction to them. They put on airs and affectations of what they believe the wealthy do, “blowing on [their] nails, then rubbing them on [their] chests for a shine” (102). The narrator even believes that the wealthy must eat while lying down, so he works extra hard to enjoy his Coca-Cola while reclining.
The arrival of the golfers teaches the boys about the reality of class. Not only does it bring home just how little they actually understand the wealthy—they do not recognize either the golf course or the men’s clubs—but also it demonstrates that class is not simply a matter of different lifestyles. Rather, class is about power and access: When the men yell at the narrator for using a golf hole to hold his coke, the message is that the boys do not belong in this place because of their economic status.
In reality, class and class divisions have subtly driven the story long before this moment. That the sewage treatment plant uses the arroyo the boys play in as a dumping ground suggests the economic status of those living around the creek, as heavily polluted neighborhoods tend to be lower income and often home to people of color. The narrator ascribes his and Sergio’s interest in exploring the hills to this pollution, remarking that the arroyo “taught them to look the other way” (100)—i.e., toward the “mountains.” Although the boys don’t understand it at the time, their journey into the hills is therefore a figurative quest for a better life. This attempted social mobility proves illusory, with the hills serving as a dividing line between the area’s wealthier and poorer districts.
The Bond of Shared Experience
One of the challenges the protagonist faces both in the story and as a narrator involves communication. The struggle is especially pronounced across generations. Teachers refuse to explain the meaning of certain (presumably sexual) terms to the junior high students, and some adults seem to speak a different language entirely. When the narrator and Sergio approach the narrator’s mother about what they view as “mountains,” they must calibrate their question to their audience: “[We] said, well, what’zin, what’zin those hills over there—we used her word so she’d understand us—and she said nothingdon’tworryaboutit” (101). The narrator also implies that some experiences simply evade expression regardless of whom one is talking to, noting that he and Sergio can’t “explain” why they go to the arroyo even to themselves.
However, this difficulty communicating does not impede Sergio and the narrator’s ability to understand one another. When they find the grinding ball, an object they don’t even know the term for, they can’t describe it or their feelings about it, but they nevertheless agree on its significance: “What we were really saying, but didn’t know the words, was how much that ball was like that place, the whole arroyo: couldn’t tell anybody about it, didn’t understand what it was, didn’t have a name for it. It just felt good” (100). In fact, the two seem perfectly in sync throughout the story, to the extent that the narrator mostly treats them as a unit, using “we” rather than “I.”
This intuitive bond seems to stem from shared history. The narrator alludes to the many childhood games and adventures he and Sergio played before abandoning the arroyo for the first time, highlighting the role these played in cementing their friendship:
It was our river, though, our personal Mississippi, our friend from long back, and it was full of stories and all the branch forts we had built in it when we were still the Vikings of America, with our own symbol, which had been carved everywhere, even in the sand, which let the water take it. That was good, we had decided; whoever was at the end of the river would know about us (98-99).
Besides underscoring the boys’ close identification with one another, the passage suggests the social function of the place itself: The arroyo too is a “friend.” Through this mutual “acquaintance,” the boys already understand each other very well by the time they take their trip into the hills, where their shared disillusionment presumably creates another unspoken point of connection.
