The Terrible Reality
The real world is a place that can be clouded or opaque. The future starts out bright, shining with optimism and dreams, but all too quick this is snatched away with age and the understanding of what this world truly holds. Peril and evil lurk along with confusion and moral decisions. Choices have to be made and the realization that the world is not as simple as we are lead to believe, but a complex one; David Kaplan’s Doe Season plays host to this concept through nine-year old Andy’s while on her first hunting trip. Andrea for the first time has a glimpse of the real world and loses her innocence when faced with questions and undergoing her own physical and mental changes finding out who she really is.
In order for a character to become its own identity it has to begin to grow by wondering which in turn creates this idea of self. At moments in the story you come across the two kids, Mac and Andy, where their age is truly shown. They do not know what they are supposed to be doing so they tend to watch the older adults and mimic them. Mac who wants to be seen as an older kid is caught repeating his father at times, “’Too late to go after them,’ Charlie muttered. ‘It’ll be dark in a quarter hour. Damn!’ ‘Damn,’ Mac echoed” (Kaplan 306). Andy was also caught in the act, “Andy held the cup the way her father did, not by the handle but around the rim” (Kaplan 305). This far in the story, both of these characters are still children learning. They do not fend for themselves yet whatsoever. They copy their parents and cannot yet act on their own. However, Andy begins to speak on her behalf as the story prolongs showing growth. Mac begins to test her and she starts opening up, “Mac said into the darkness, ‘I bet you really didn’t see no deer, did you?’ She sighed. ‘I did, Mac. Why would I lie’” (Kaplan 306). She voices her own un-influenced thoughts and not only thinks them but says them with authority. She is beginning to define her own personal self; she is growing up.
Andy lives within a small, narrow mind only seeing so little. She is merely emerging from her shell and stepping out into the real world and now picturing how vast it really is. Andy’s world begins with her house and the patch of woods behind her house and that’s the way she liked to think of it. She goes on saying, “They stretch all the way to here, she thought, for miles and miles, longer than I could walk in a day, or a week even, but they are still the same woods” (Kaplan 302). She is unaware of the sheer magnitude of landscape this world holds. Andy is confronted with something she does not quite understand when she first steps out of this enclosure while on a trip to the ocean, “Everything lay hidden. If you walked in it, you couldn’t see how deep it was or what might be below” (Kaplan 305). Upon leaving her sanctuary she is greeted with this place she did not know existed and it scares her. It also can be a metaphor for the future. We tend to fear things we do not see or understand. Andy cannot see what lie under the water, nor can she see what the future hold in store for her. It signifies a moment in her life when she begins to realize life does not revolve around her. This moment of growth begins to set in motion and sets the stage for her next upcoming life lesson.
As children, we are hidden to many things and it seems like life is okay and we are hand fed everything, making it simple. When things are simple, nothing wrong can happen because things go right over our heads. Andy first seems eager to go hunting and never complains. She wants to prove she is old enough. She doesn’t know what this means; does she truly know the grisly end of the deer or the site of the deer being gutted? On the trip to the hunting grounds, we see how blind she really is and her age shows, “There has to be one moment when it all changes from dark to light, Andy thought. She had missed it yesterday, in the car; today she would watch more closely” (Kaplan 308). She is still so very young and is trying to understand things like how day turns to night. This is also a metaphor, she is still very young and this moment she is looking for is her seeing the world as it truly is. When she says she says she will watch more closely, perhaps she considers she is going to begin to search for answers. She is through being told things are alright, she wants to know the truth. This truth is the complexity of the world.
Andy begins to see and feel things after she is forced to make a moral decision. This moment was the shooting of the doe. It is the moment her life begins to turn upside down here now and after, “He was looking at her; they were all looking at her. Suddenly she was angry at the deer, who refused to hear them, who wouldn’t run away even when it could. ‘I’ll shoot it’” (Kaplan 310). She is pressured, she has to speak out for herself and define herself as a person. In the beginning she was hopeful and thought nothing of the hunt, but now she is becoming her own identity and thinking on her own without words begin put in her mouth. She goes ahead with the shot, but is soon faced with the killing of the doe in a nightmare later. The idea of watching something so beautiful and graceful shot down, and run scared shatters her childhood innocence introducing her first hand to evils within the world.
Along with the shooting of the deer, Andy was also faced with another question, “’She’s always been Andy to me,’ her father said. Charlie spoon was still grinning. ‘So what are you gonna be, Andrea? A boy or a girl’” (Kaplan 309). Andy’s father speaks for her saying how she has always been Andy to him, but this is not said by Andy. She is beginning to change from following along with her father and have a say with her life. There is also a meaning behind doe season rather buck season. Andy is faced with being asked, are you going to be a boy or girl when you grow up. Killing the doe signifies killing her future of being a woman. She hunts and fishes like the men and now she would be killing off her own existence as a woman with the pull of the trigger. Andy is in a dilemma and is beginning to go against the hunt.
The moment Andy finally makes her decision that she clearly stands out and defines herself is the last scene of the story. The men gut the deer in front of Andy who is horrified and runs off. They begin to call her, but she makes her choice, “crying Andy, Andy (but that wasn’t her name, she would no longer be called that)” (Kaplan 314). She wants to be a woman, but now is vaulted into a whole new world of confusion because she is now on her own; she is not following her father’s choices, but hers alone. It is once again like the sea where she is afraid and out of her comfort zone, “all around her roared the mocking of the terrible, now inevitable, sea” (Kaplan 314). Andrea, as she is called now, feels lost once again and sees the world as it is. The world, it is vast, filled with evil, and the unknown-which we fear.
Andy is a dynamic character who we can all relate to. We begin our youth as ignorant people, unaware of what lies outside our narrow minds. As we begin to grow, we see things we cannot yet understand and begin to be curious. Once we reach out and think and act on our own, we see things we have not yet seen before. We learn that there are things we cannot control and bad will happen. It all seems to hit us like Andrea thought the light just turned to dark. We soon grow to learn that the inevitable sea, the future, will hold certain death and the rest be unknown. It’s a scary place out there, and we slowly build it up until it hits us all at once.