The Loss of Innocence in the "The Secret Lion".
The short story, The Secret Lion, written by Alberto Alvaro Rios portrays the concerns of a young boy and his friend that are coming to believe that anything they like or enjoy will eventually get taken away from them. The story constantly shows this through a series events that take place in the children's life that seem to all begin when they are reaching their junior high school years. Through no fault of their own the children are having their fun times taken away from them by their mother, by complete strangers, or just simply because the fact that they are growing up. In the story we can see how the author uses symbolism to compare the feelings that the kids have when things are taken from them to that of a lion's roar. Something that is great, full of magic, and very difficult to forget just like the experience that human beings go through when they start loosing their innocence and start maturing at certain point of their lives.
The first example of the children losing their innocence is when Alberto and Sergio are describing the transition from elementary school to junior high school. This is when it becomes apparent to them that things change as a result of age. The kids are starting to grow up, they do not have only one teacher they now have "teacherz" and they feel "personally abandoned somehow" (223). They are amazed or personally abandoned because they believed that by having six different teachers they would receive more attention. Just the opposite happened and they end up receiving less attention. ""When a person had all these teachers now, he didn't get taken care of in the same way, even though six was more than one" (223). They cannot express themselves as they would like to because they are still trying to adapt to the new world that is opening for them, a new world that they anxiously want to discover and explore.
