David Michael Kaplan's Doe Season - Essay Example

John Schamel Williams 10/12 David Michael Kaplans "Doe Season" – An Analysis David Michael Kaplan was born in 1946, and published his first short story, “Doe Season”, in the year 1985. The universal theme of the story lies along the lines of the transition of an individual from childhood to adulthood, and how the process takes place. The author makes use of various symbols to explain how the girl, Andy, loses her childlike innocence and transforms into an adult and discovers her own identity. Each of the various elements, such as plot, symbols, characters, setting, and conflict, contributes to our understanding of the transformation the girl goes through. Starting with the plot, the story is focused on a girl named Andy, who goes on a hunting trip with her father, his friend and son. Andy is at the point of her life where soon she will be making a transition to womanhood and the thought of that scares her. By taking part in manly activities like hunting, she wants to delay the transition as much as she can. Throughout the trip, she longs to hunt down a deer, just to prove her manliness. However, when she finally comes across a dear and is about to shoot it, she wills for it to run away so that she would not have to kill it. She thinks, "Why doesnt it hear us, why doesnt it run away" (Kaplan 518). The deer does not run away, until she shoots it. Andy gets quite disturbed by her actions and that night, she dreams about the doe showing up near her with a gaping wound. When she pets it, she is able to see the beating heart of the deer. The next morning, she, along with others, finds the dear dead. When her father cuts it open, it becomes too much for her to handle and she starts running away from the scene. This places Andy from struggling to maintain her carefree, girlish nature to facing the realities of her metamorphosis into womanhood. She finds out that she is not too brave as the men are in handling the situation, witnessing how an animal is killed. This shows that Andy is indeed a carefree girl turning into a woman who is meant to act as one and not like a male. There were four main characters in the story: Andy, her father, his friend “Charlie Spreun”, and Charlie’s son “Mac”. However, all of the focus is placed on Andy and the rest of the characters have very limited roles to play. Andy is shown as a young girl who is at a critical stage in her life. She will soon be making a transition from childhood to adulthood and that is really affecting her emotionally. Her character is quite dynamic, as she is seen to go through various trials in the story, and matures as the story progresses. Throughout the story, her behavior depicts her as someone trying to show herself to be strong and manly like her father, as she imitates his actions. For example, while drinking coffee, she imitates the way he holds his cup (Kaplan 513). However, this act falls away when she shoots the doe. The innocence about her is destroyed at this point. She starts to believe that the child in her does not exist anymore; it died with the death of the doe. Her father was someone who encouraged her interest in such activities, and liked sharing interests with her in activities such as hunting. He did not believe that she was any less qualified to carry out hunting just because she was a girl. On the other hand, Charlie Spreun and his son did not think it was a good idea for her to be out hunting with them and doubted her throughout the trip. Kaplan used various symbols to portray Andy’s transition from being a girl to a woman. Before Andy begins to dream on the night after killing, she hears an owl. Owls usually symbolize the gaining of knowledge or insight. They bring messages from your unconscious about things you dont want to recognize but need to. In this case, the owl represents the transition of Andy from childhood to womanhood. When she wakes up, everything has changed. The dream was also a symbol of changes Andy went through. In the dream, Andy feels the wound where she had shot the dear. She places her hand inside and feels the heart of the doe and feels it beating (Kaplan 520). This symbolized that she wanted the doe to be alive. When she tries to take her hand out, it starts to hurt which symbolized the guilt she was feeling over shooting the doe. In a more figurative sense, it also symbolized the fact that she was growing up and had to accept consequences for her actions. The smell of blood when she wakes up further represents the process of menstruation, something that every girl has to go through to become a woman. The story is set in the woods where the protagonist is shown to be comfortable with. This represents the childhood stage Andy was experiencing, having been comfortable and used to it. She felt so safe in the woods that is why she was able to volunteer doing tasks without supervision. Moreover, when she became the focus of the men’s conversation, she went into the woods to comfort herself. The setting also symbolizes certain factors. The woods symbolize the unknown. Andy does not know what lies ahead of her when going into the woods or what she will encounter. Andy and the others head for the woods when it is dark and arrive at daytime, a symbolism of the new start ahead and that a change is going to come. In addition, the story also juxtaposed womanhood to the ocean. When Andy thought about her mother being very comfortable in the ocean while she was so afraid to go into the deeper parts, the author was symbolizing the fear of the girl from growing into a woman. Her mother was very comfortable in the ocean because she was already a woman and this makes the symbolism clear. The conflict presented in the story is in the form of Andy’s confused emotional state of mind ranging from wanting to be accepted in the group of men just as she is to the fear of what might it be when she turns into a woman. She felt bad that her being a girl hunting with the men; was an issue among her companions, even with her dad who finally chimed in with the comments of Mr. Spreun and his son. She is afraid to embrace womanhood and tries doing everything in her power to stop it from coming. This conflict is finally resolved after she shoots the deer and accepts the reality of her life: she is a girl and no action of her can deny that truth. These are some of the many elements that the author has used to display one universal theme: the transition from childhood to adulthood, and the many emotional factors attached to it. At the very end of the story, we see how Andy fully embraces her womanhood by going back to her original name “Andrea” (Scribner 397). This shows how she has finally accepted the reality and her mind is not conflicted anymore. Works Cited Kaplan, David M. "Doe Season" Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2007. 511-521. Keppen, Julie. Contemporary Authors: Vol. 230. Detroit: Gale Research, 2005. Internet resource. Williford, Lex, and Michael Martone. The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction: Fifty North American Stories Since 1970. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1999. Print. Read More