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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Reservoir, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Maturity
Independence vs. Obedience
Fear, Curiosity, and Exploration
Friendship and Loneliness
Nature vs Modernization
Summary
Analysis
The children of a New Zealand village love to play in the wilderness around the local gully, though the village has some disdain for the wildlife. The village agrees that respect is important for “birds, animals and people, especially children.” Because they value respect, the children follow the orders of their parents and do not explore the local Reservoir, which stands past the gully “at the end of the world.” They go on long walks together, and when their suspicious parents ask where the children went, they always respond, “Oh, nearly, nearly to the Reservoir!”
As the backdrop for most of their games, the wilderness plays a significant role in the children’s lives. Their connection to nature is limited, however, by their parents’ orders about how far the children can explore. The village adults’ emphasis on respect does not seem to bother the children, despite the fact that they themselves are arguably disrespected by the notion that animals and children should be respectful. This belief dehumanizes children and places wildlife within the human hierarchy of respect, too.
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The Reservoir replaced a water pump and has brought running water to the town. When the narrator is careless with the water taps, her father scolds her, expressing his concern that the Reservoir might run dry. This frightens the narrator, who is afraid of dying of thirst if the Reservoir dries up. The narrator’s mother tells her the Reservoir gives pure, “treated” water. The narrator doesn’t know what “treated” means, and imagines that “during the night men in light-blue uniforms” drag corpses to the Reservoir “to dissolve dead bodies and prevent the decay of teeth.”
The newness of the Reservoir indicates that the story is set in the mid-20th century, when developments in water treatment began to expand to rural areas. It also introduces a theme of modernization that runs throughout the story, and it stands in contrast with the wilderness that the narrator has emphasized so far. The mother’s explanation in this passage that the Reservoir gives the village pure water shows how the village appreciates the Reservoir, but the father’s concern that the Reservoir might run dry reveals that the villages don’t have a full understanding of how a reservoir works. This puts the adults on a surprisingly similar level to their children, whose imagined versions of the Reservoir paints it as a terrifying unknown.
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The parents of the town discuss the Reservoir. They claim children have drowned there, and they all agree “no child […] ought to be allowed near the Reservoir.” The children obey this command, and instead play around the village. They walk along the gully, wading in the “untreated cast-off creek which we loved.” The children know the land well––where the water is safe for paddling, where eels and weeds lurk, where to jump, and all the “dangers, limitations, and advantages.”
The children also know “the moods of the creek,” which often changes its course. The creek’s course is a source of discussion and reverence from the children and their parents. When the creek is “high-flow,” churning with turbulence and mud, it is full of waste from “whatever evil which ‘they,’ the authorities, had decided to purge” from the Reservoir.
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The children continue to obey their parents and avoid the Reservoir as the school year comes to an end. The summer is long and hot, and the children quickly break or lose interest in their Christmas presents. To pass the tedious days, the children spread rumors. Between hours of games and swimming, the children tell outlandish stories about sharks and the sea drying up. They also play games “mimick[ing] grown-up life, loving and divorcing each other.”
The summer heat drains the life from the children and the dried-out world around them. The exhaustion is so extreme that the children are relieved to realize that school will soon reopen. The school year seems so far away that the narrator assumes the children have “forgotten everything [they] had learned, how frightening, thrilling and strange it would all seem!” As the children wait for school to start, they look forward to the school’s shady interior. Before lessons can begin, however, an epidemic of Infantile Paralysis sweeps the village. The schools do not reopen, and the children have to receive their schoolwork by mail.
The children are so bored by the heat and their lessons by post that they decide to walk by the creek. The narrator’s mother reminds the narrator not to go to the Reservoir, but the children “dismiss the warning.” The children like to watch courting couples and make jokes about kissing and sex. They wonder if the young men in the couples will use a “frenchie,” or condom, because if he does not, his girlfriend will “start having a baby and be forced to get rid of it by drinking gin.” However, on this day there are no couples, so the children follow the creek until someone suggests they go to the Reservoir.
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The children are unsure. They have always known they would someday visit the Reservoir, but that day seemed far away and they aren’t sure this is the right time. The narrator “timidly” says that the children have been told not to go, but they decide to go to the Reservoir anyway. It is a long way there, and the narrator wonders if the walk will take all day and night, and the children will have to sleep among the pine trees, with hooting owls, old warrens “waiting to seize us if we tripped,” and the crying of the trees. The narrator believes pine trees speak to each other. Listening to them makes the children lonely because “we could never help them say [...] whatever they were trying to say.”
The children discuss Billy Whittaker and the Green Feather gang, who went to the Reservoir one afternoon. Billy Whittaker got an iron lung two years ago after a bout of Infantile Paralysis, and all the children envy “the glamour of an iron lung.” One of the children, in a voice “trying to sound bossy like our father,” urges the others onward toward the Reservoir. They move on, waving sticks and trying to make them into musical instruments. Their efforts fail, much to their frustration. The narrator wonders, frustrated, “why [can’t] we ever make anything out of the bits of the world lying about us?”
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An airplane passes, and all the children pause to look at it. Then they continue to the Reservoir. The narrator wonders what exactly the Reservoir is. People say that it is a lake, but the narrator thinks it is “a bundle of darkness” whose wheels can “dr[a]w you toward them with demonic force.” The children pass wild plants and reach the end of the gully, where they encounter new barbed-wire fences and signs against trespassers.
As they venture onward, the children come across a bull paddock. The bull inside has a ring through its nose, indicating that it has been tamed, but “it had once been savage and it kept its pride.” The bull stands alone in its paddock. The children recall a neighbor, Mr. Bennet, who was gored by his own tame bull, and when one of them notices the bull is pawing the ground preparing to charge, the children flee. After regaining their courage, they move around the paddock and keep heading for the Reservoir.
The children’s path brings them back along the creek, and though they express relief, the creek seems to have changed while it disappeared by the bull-paddock. It “foam[s] in a way we did not recognize as belonging to our special creek,” and they realize “we had suddenly lost possession of our creek.” The children are upset, so to cheer themselves up they wave their sticks in the air, which successfully lets them “forg[e]t our dismay.”
One of the children says that it’s getting late, and they remind each other that the sun doesn’t seem to move during the summer until people stop looking at it. This leads to a discussion of the tropics. The children correct each other about sand and snails until one of them sprains an ankle, after which they “quarrel” over how to pronounce “sprained,” “ambulance,” and “hospital.”
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While the children bicker, the creek goes on high-flow. Their discomfort vanishes, and the children are confident this is their “same old creek.” They approach a wide spread of pine trees, staying close to the creek until it “desert[s]” them. Between the trees, they find a “vast” and “dazzling” body of water––the Reservoir. The children cry out in excitement.
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The Reservoir appears calm and quiet. There are no birds, and the only sound is the sighing of the pine trees. The narrator perceives that the Reservoir’s “appearance of neatness” hides a lack of order. The trees’ sighing seems to hush the children, “as if something were sleeping and should not be disturbed.” The narrator wonders what is sleeping in the Reservoir, and if that thing is why people are afraid of it. The children, however, are no longer afraid of the Reservoir. They climb through the fence and swing on trees, ignoring the noticeboard that says DANGER, RESERVOIR.
The children play around the Reservoir, regarding it “possessively and delightedly,” until it seems to be getting dark. One of the children starts to run, and everyone else follows toward the creek. They recognize the creek is no longer theirs, though they wish it still was. The children have no idea what time it is, and they imagine darkness overtaking them, forcing them to sleep on the banks of the creek that is no longer theirs, surrounded by wild plants and dead animals. They wonder if the eels will emerge from the creek and shapeshift into various threats. Their fears grow––maybe the eels will give the children Infantile Paralysis, trapping them in the woods where no one would find them or bring them an iron lung.
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Finally, the children return home, out of breath and scratched up from their journey. “How strange,” the narrator thinks, as she realizes the sun is still in the same place in the sky. The children wonder if they should tell their parents where they have been, but “the question [is] decided for [them].” The narrator’s mother greets the children at the door saying, “I hope you didn’t go anywhere near the Reservoir,” and the narrator’s father looks up from his newspaper to echo the same sentiment. The children say nothing, instead sharing a mutual disdain and amusement for the fear of the “out-of-date” parents.
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