The Secret Lion

Because the story unfolds in first-person point of view, the syntax reflects the speech patterns of an adolescent (or younger) boy. The first key difference is the use of fragmented sentences to convey heightened emotion. When the boys discover the grinder ball, the narrator imagines that his mother would make him dispose of it, and when he describes what they do instead, he uses a series of fragments: “So we didn’t. Take it home. Instead we came up with an answer. We dug a hole and we buried it. And we marked it secretly. Lots of signs” (99). At his moment of excitement, the narrator uses short sentences to convey urgency.

Second, the narration uses dialogue without spaces and with nonstandard spelling or grammar to suggest their class status: “We came running in one summer Thursday morning, my friend Sergio and I, into my mother’ s kitchen, and said, well, what’zin, what’zin those hills over there” (101). By using “what’zin” rather than “what’s in,” the story evokes both the boys’ young age (as small children often stumble over their speech) and the colloquialisms of a lower- or middle-class household.

There are two timelines in this story, and they are not clearly divided. The frame story, introduced in the first lines, contains the narrator’s reflections on his first year of junior year and his and Sergio’s discovery of the grinding ball (which occurs at some unspecified point during this transition).

The framed timeline begins following a space between paragraphs that marks a deeper dive into the narrator’s past. This flashback takes place when the narrator is five, or shortly thereafter, as it is his first summer in the arroyo. However, when the narrator returns to the frame story, it is not immediately obvious he has done so. There is no text break, and the first sentence could easily apply to the months after the incident on the golf course: “We went back to the arroyo for the rest of the summer, and tried to have fun the best that we could” (102). It is only the next sentence’s reference to the grinding ball that clarifies the time frame. This draws a thematic throughline between the two episodes, suggesting the way in which their early introduction to The Reality of Class Differences affects the boys’ later coming-of-age experience.

When the boys first find the golf course, the narrator compares it to arriving at the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, saying that it’s “like when they got to Oz and everything was so green, so emerald, they had to wear those glasses and we just ran like them, laughing, laughing that way we did at that moment” (102). The allusion references the joyous moment of entering the city but foreshadows the rude awakening the narrator and Sergio are about to experience. In The Wizard of Oz, the characters struggle to get to the city of Oz to meet the Wizard and ask him to grant their requests for courage, brains, heart, and the ability to get home. However, when they arrive, it all turns out to be a sham. The Wizard is an illusion. Likewise, these boys will realize that their heaven was simply a golf course used by snobbish elites.