‘Your little Juan is safe with God, my son’ she [great-grandmother] comforted”. The realistic short story, “The Horned Toad”, written by Gerald Haslam, is awe-inspiring. In “The Horned Toad”, taking place in the mid 1940’s, in Oildale, California, a young boy learns how to be a companion with his great-grandmother.
The narrator finds a horned toad that changes his perspective about his great-grandmother. In life, sometimes people have to close their eyes and then open them again to understand the true values in each other. At first, the narrator and his great-grandmother despised each other, but then, they began to understand the true values in one another. One example was when the narrator returned from school and attempted to avoid his great-grandmother. “… One afternoon I returned from school and saw Grandma perched on the porch as usual, so I started to walk around the house to avoid her sharp, mostly incomprehensible tongue…”.
Another example was when the narrator asked his great-grandmother for a piece of candy and she told him that he should buy his own. “Oh, you wan’ some candy. Go to the story an buy some…. For now, the narrator and his great-grandmother have a rough relationship. But soon, this will change because of one thing: the horned toad. The author, Gerald Haslam, uses the horned toad as the symbol to reveal the theme. The author uses the horned toad to reveal the character’s traits when the narrator’s great-grandmother told her grandson that the horned toad must be returned to where he originally came from. ‘We must return him [the horned toad] to his own place.
When Juan died, the narrator and his great-grandmother visited the toad’s grave on a regular basis. “… We kept the horned toad’s death a secret, and we visited his small grave frequently…”. After the death of the horned toad, the narrator and his great-grandmother learned to bond even more with each other. By the end of the story, the narrator learned to have a whole new perspective towards people, mainly his great-grandmother. The narrator learned this important lesson when he began to spend more time with his great-grandmother.
