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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Secret Lion
The titular lion symbolizes Loss of Innocence and the accompanying changes that the narrator finds so disturbing. First referenced in connection with beginning junior high, it is a metaphor for a feeling that the narrator “[doesn’t] have a name for, but […] was there nonetheless like a lion, and roaring, roaring that way the biggest things do” (98). Like the transition to adolescence, the lion is unwelcome but unavoidable in its noise and potential danger.
The lion reappears at the very end of the text when the narrator reflects on the loss of the grinding ball: “We buried [the ball] because it was perfect. We didn’t tell my mother, but together it was all we talked about, til we forgot. It was the lion” (102). Here, the narrator recounts his and Sergio’s struggle with the perfection the ball represents: They want to preserve that perfection but ultimately realize the only way to do so is to “lose” the ball so that it can never be altered by later experience.
The Grinding Ball
The grinding ball is a cannonball-like object used in mining that fell or was thrown into the arroyo, where the narrator and Sergio find it. The ball quickly captures their imaginations: “We had this perception about nature then, that nature is imperfect and that round things are perfect” (99). This perfect ball symbolizes perfection—especially the youth and innocence that soon escape these boys. Because they’re afraid their parents would tell them to get rid of it, they bury the ball with the intention of returning for it. Early in the narrative, the narrator claims that they looked for it extensively. By the end, however, he admits, “We loved it, and when we buried it we knew what would happen. The truth is, we didn’t look so hard for it” (102). The ball enters their memory much like childhood does; rather than risk tainting that perfect memory, they choose to let go.
The Arroyo
Closely connected to the grinding ball, the dry river bed that the boys explore symbolizes their idyllic shared boyhood. It is present in both timelines as a central setting. When the boys are younger, they experience the arroyo with water in it—something that is implied to be different when they are adolescents, suggesting the loss of innocence they have already experienced. Nevertheless, they return to the arroyo to escape the pressures of adolescence, as their history with the creek links it to their childhood and their friendship with one another: “It was our personal Mississippi, our friend from long back, and it was full of stories and all the branch forts we had built in it” (98).
The arroyo also represents The Reality of Class Differences. Even when the arroyo has water in it, it is tainted by the nearby sewage treatment plant: “Every third or fourth or fifth day, the sewage treatment plant that was, we found out, upstream, would release whatever it was that was released, and we would never know exactly what day it was” (100). This contrasts dramatically with the luxury of the golf course that exists beyond the nearby hills.
The Golf Course
The golf course symbolizes the Garden of Eden. It is described as lush and beautiful, full of trees and greenery that do not typically exist in this area of Arizona, and the boys think it resembles “heaven”—another paradisical realm. The boys’ expulsion from the golf course also coincides with a loss of innocence, just as Adam and Eve’s departure from Eden does. However, the symbolism is not a one-to-one transposition. Unlike Adam and Eve, for whom the Garden of Eden was intended, the boys are interlopers on the golf course. In this, they correspond to the serpent, but the story treats them much more sympathetically than the golfers who “belong” there. Ríos therefore invokes the story of Eden to demonstrate how imperfect the world actually is: What initially looks like paradise is merely a golf course, and the boys must leave it not because they’ve done anything wrong but simply because they’re lower class.
