A Kid's Life: Alberto Alvaro Rios's "The Secret Lion".
"The Secret Lion" depicts two twelve year old kids as adventurous young voyagers that want to find out what's so good about things adults keep from them. The author, Alberto Alvaro Rios, shows the reader how a child can take something small and turn it into a vast situation. He uses many clear literary elements, such as symbolism, tone, character, setting, and point of view to show what looking back on a young kid's is like.
Symbolism is one of the major literary elements in "The Secret Lion." Rios uses symbolism throughout the whole story with objects and even thoughts by the narrator. The story begins with this element by comparing something happening to a lion roaring. He moves on to use a rug and magician trick to clarify the same subject. Rios writes:.
I was twelve and in junior high school and something happened that we didn't have a name for, but it was there nonetheless like a lion, and roaring, roaring that way the biggest things do. Everything changed. Just that. Like the rug, the one that gets pulled - or better, like the tablecloth those magicians pull where the stuff on the table stays the same but the gasp! From the audience makes the staying-the-same part not matter. Like that (223).
This illustrates the image that something did happen, but it seemed like nothing altered, just a feeling of change. The golf course that they journeyed over the hill to get to is compared to Heaven. "Perfect. Heaven was green, like nothing else in Arizona." (226) This develops a good picture of how immense the arrival to the green paradise was. The narrator describes the place as if it were indeed Heaven. The use of symbolism is very stunning throughout the story, and, in my opinion, the most abundant literary element used in "The Secret Lion.".
Rios also uses tone to make the story seem more like its in the thoughts of a twelve year old kid. He uses lots of dialog with words that run together, or sentences that aren't complete.