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.