Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth-century literature. In this essay, Aubrey analyzes Rivera's story as an example of an initiation story.

Rivera's "The Harvest" is a brief story, covering in some editions no more than three pages. However, springing up from this spare narrative are the archetypal themes of initiation and search, and one archetypal character, that of the Wise Old Man. These structural patterns are archetypal in the sense that they recur in many different myths and literatures of the world and seem to reflect universal human desires and life processes. Since the most prominent of these themes in "The Harvest" is that of initiation, the story can be classified as an initiation story.

The term "initiation" was originally employed by anthropologists to describe the rituals used in primitive societies to mark the passage from boyhood to manhood...