Deep Water

How would you feel if you drowned as a little child and couldn’t breathe and could never swim again without remembering what had happened and living with that fear? In the short story Deep Water by William O. Douglas he begins with a fear and learns to conquer it by swimming across a lake and back so many times he gets over his fear and loves swimming the rest of his life.

William drowns as a kid and then has a fear from then on and cannot swim because he is afraid that It will happen again. When he is 11 or 12 he goes to the Y.M.C.A and swims on the shallow end until other guys come and throw him in the deep end. He drowns there and cannot get out he screams but no one hears him. He blacks out and a life guard saves him and puts him on the side of the pool so that he can get all of the water out of his lungs. after this happens William does not stop trying to get rid of this fear so he keeps trying to swim and never gives up.

Next he gets an instructor to help him and swim with him, so that he can try to get over his fear of water. Every time he went across the pool he lost a little bit of the fear but if his instructor loosened his grip on the rope he was holding William would get some of the fear back. Piece by piece his instructor helped him get over his fear but it wasn’t gone yet his instructor finished with him but his fear was still with him.

At the end of the story he swims across a lake multiple times to try and get rid of it the fear comes but he just ignores the fear and keeps swimming. I personally think this is a good story because it gets straight to the point apposing to stories that just take a really long time to get to the moral of the story and are hard to understand and follow. I think that this is kind of alike to the pearl because William and Kino keep their pride no matter what happens.

The Pearl


The Pearl starts off with a poor family that runs into a problem. The problem is that their son Coyotito got stung by a scorpion and they need money so that the doctor will treat him. Kino, the father, went out to find a pearl so that they would have enough money to get Coyotito to the doctor. The pivoting point in the story is when Kino finds the pearl of all pearls, the pearl he finds is huge. The whole town finds out about Kino's findings, he starts to since an evil feeling coming from people and the pearl. When it comes to selling the pearl Kino can't sell it in his town because all the pearl buyers are working for the same person so they try to cheat Kino, but he doesn't sell the pearl. He then tries to go to the city to sell the pearl but before he can go he is attacked by someone trying to steal the pearl from Kino, Kino had to defend his self by stabbing and killing the attacker.

So he has to flee the town because there are trackers coming after him, his wife, Juana insists on going with him so they flee up to a mountain to get away from the trackers. There were three trackers, two on foot, one on horse with a rifle. Kino decided to attack them while they were sleeping, so when he attacked them Kino first tried to get the man on horse, in the struggle Kino killed the trackers but his son was killed by a bullet. Kino then threw the pearl away.

Kino is a determined man, and he does what he thinks is right, like on selling the pearl to the towns pearl buyers. He has a small mustache and short black hair. Juana, kino's wife has long black hair and smart. A conflict in the story is when Kino had a choice between selling the pearl to the pearl dealers in his town or to sell it someplace else. Although the towns people thought Kino should have sold the pearl to the dealer for the little amount he offered Kino, but Kino did what he thought was right and did not sell the pearl.

I thought the pearl was a good story. There were some parts in the story that I got bored of reading because it wasn't keeping my interest. Most of the book was good, I thought that it showed how people in real life act when they have the chance to get some money. Like how the doctor wouldn't treat Coyotito until he found out that Kino had found the pearl, and even then he had
tricked Kino.

I don’t really like how this book ended because he didn’t want to sell it because it didn’t give him the money he thought the pearl was worth but in the end he threw it in the ocean instead of selling the pearl and getting money just not as much as he would want. And I dont like how koyotito got shot and died because after all kino has been through not really paying attention to koyotito he fianlly pays attention to him but hes dead.

I like the story so far mainly because it doesn’t bore me right away in the beginning because it gets right to the subject of the story and you don’t know what's going to happen next. This is a good book to me and I usually never read and when I actually read the book every one is amazed.

Juana thinks it will destroy there relationship because he is starting not to trust anyone and he keeps it safe in his hands. kino might get obsessed with the pearl and then go insane. Like he might turn out to be like the guy in lord of the rings that says my precious a lot. If kino gets so obsessed with the pearl that he doesn’t trust anyone including jauna and koyotito then I think that he will be left.