K's "Tuck Everlasting Paper"

Grade: 6

Objective: To spend time with a text, thoughtfully analyzing a central question

Why did Winnie Foster in the book “Tuck Everlasting” choose to die over live forever?

By K, Grade 6

Winnie lives a life of rules.  She can’t go beyond the radius of her own yard. She must sit up straight; she must not lick her fingers even when there smothered with syrup.   Then she meets the Tucks. They do not have any little rules like “sit up straight” or “no rolling around in the grass you’ll get your dress dirty.” They don’t care about little things like that--only the big picture. They had time to clean their house or other little chores whenever they wanted, they had more time than you could imagine—because they could live forever.  Toward the end of the book Winnie is confronted with a choice: she could choose to live forever and go with the Tucks.  All she would have to do is drink from the spring in the forest and it would be so.  In a conversation between Tuck and Winnie out boating in a pond, Tuck solemnly states: “Know what that is all around us Winnie?...Life. Moving, growing, changing, never the same two minutes together.” (Babbitt 61)  Winnie chooses not to drink the water and live forever because she did not want to be taken out of the circle of life, she wanted to cherish her life and not just have all the time in the world to do everything she wanted to do but fit them in and make them special. She wanted to live and die as a human being.

  Tuck Everlasting starts with a metaphor of a Ferris wheel turning slowly and then stops in its turning like the Tucks life whose Ferris wheel was turning but then suddenly it stopped.  Winnie started noticing the circle of life after that boat ride in the pond outside the Tucks little cottage—her life was still turning, slowly, but turning. The Tucks had stopped. Winnie decides not to drink the water because she does not want to stop in her turning.  She doesn't want to have to endure the pain of seeing the world go by without her. 

 Winnie chose not to drink the water because she wanted to live and die as a human being she wanted to cherish her life. The Tucks don’t have any more of the friends of which they've experienced hard times or laughed with time and time again. Miles was married once and had two children but Miles stayed young and his wife and children grew older. His wife thought he was cursed so she left him and took the children with her, after a while they all went through the circle and died, but Miles was still there, young and the same way he was decades ago. Winnie heard this story and other bits and pieces, she knew that was not how she envisioned a life for herself or even could imagine. How could she drink the water? She just wouldn't do it. She may be afraid of death, but she was more afraid of watching as time goes by friends and family dying as humans should but her not being there with them. She could only live as a human being if she died as a human being. 

Before Winnie met the Tucks she lived a strict but safe life. ”No slouching in your chair” and “No rolling in the grass” are the everyday words of her mother and grandmother.  But when Winnie met the Tucks all that changed, they had none of those silly rules of her family. She began to realize that to live is a risk but she wanted to take that risk. The big risk that she chooses to take is the risk to not drink the water to stay mortal and to stay as a human being. Winnie loved the Tucks, but she couldn't stay with them forever. She chooses to go back to her family and not drink the water. She accepts the risks of a mortal life. Life is something that Winnie chooses to cherish.  She takes the risk: The risk to live.