A White Heron

4 Pages 1090 Words

Short Stories can be interpreted in Many Ways
Any type of literary work can contain secret messages throughout the story, and it’s up to the reader to analyze and figure these hidden messages out. Some stories contain themes that are obvious, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have other underlying themes. If the reader reads a literary piece more than once, then they’re apt to pick up much more than when they read it first. In Sarah Ornes Jewetts’, A White Heron, it sounds like a simple story at first, but once it’s analyzed and picked apart, there are many more aspects to the story that are revealed. This story is about an innocent, naïve girl named Sylvia who matures throughout the story and realizes the importance of keeping the secret of the white heron.
When the reader first starts to read A White Heron, it sounds like a simple story about a young, curious girl living with her grandmother on a farm, and a bird hunter who is looking for a heron that the young girl has seen before. This hunter is willing to pay anyone who shows him where the heron is located ten dollars, because the Heron is a very valuable bird that usually isn’t found in that climate. The little girl locates the nest of the herring, but decides not to tell the hunter. After that scene the story ends.
Sylvia, the little girl in this story, is portrayed as a young, innocent, curious girl who is discovering the world. By the end of this story, it is quite clear that she has matured a great deal for a nine year old. Sylvia started establishing morals that she will
live by for the rest of her life. In the beginning of the short story, A White Heron, Sylvia was very much afraid of the woods which were in the back of her grandmother’s farm house. “They were going away from the western light, and striking deep into the dark woods..” (Jewett, 183). Her grandmother always warned her about the dangers of the woods, and never to go...