Tuck starts out by telling Winnie about how life is constantly "moving, growing, changing, [and] never the same two minutes together." He tells her about the water and how it is always moving and changing. He reminds her that someday the water will go to the ocean. He talks about evaporation, rain, and steam. As Tuck talks, they float on the rowboat, watching the water. Then he stops using the oars to row the boat and it begins to drift. The rowboat drifts into "the rotting branches of a fallen tree." Then Tuck explains to Winnie the difficulty of their situation. He compares the family's eternal life to the boat being stuck in the branches. He tells her that they are "stuck so's [they] can't move on." They feel "dropped off... [and] left behind... [while] everywhere around [them], things is moving and growing and changing."
Winnie realizes that while the...
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Tuck family will go on forever, her life will eventually "go out, like the flame of a candle." She realizes that she does not "want to die."
In "Tuck Everlasting," what does Mr. Tuck discuss with Winnie while rowing?
In Chapter Twelve of Tuck Everlasting, Tuck takes Winnie out onto the pond in a rowboat just as the sun is setting. They bear witness to the different kinds of wildlife and the natural world around them, and Tuck begins to tell Winnie that life is a wheel which has its natural cycles of beginnings and endings; this is organic and the way that the world is intended to be.
The boat slides into a tree and stops moving, at which point Tuck compares his family to the boat. They have defied that natural order of things by becoming immortal. He is unhappy with this fact and believes that it is a violation of the way life is intended to be. He does not want to live forever.
Winnie, on the other hand, is frightened of the idea of death and wishes that she could become immortal, too. Tuck attempts to explain that the fact that his family will not die is "wrong." Ultimately, he wants Winnie to weigh her decision very carefully before she commits to drinking the water and seizing immortality for herself.