Hence, while Esperanza remains the only protagonist, she somehow manages to embody the collective feelings of a community. Through her first-person narration, Esperanza walks in their shoes, feeling their emotions and thinking their thoughts, allowing the reader to know what it’s like to be them. She explores this sentiment through Marin – a stranger who’s stuck just like her.Ĭisneros expertly makes Esperanza a proxy narrator, using imaginary characters like Geraldo and Rafaela to tell the stories of others in the community. For example, Esperanza, seeing the despair that surrounds her in the community, wishes to be far away from it. However, it never seems to digress from the main plot but rather supplements it. Esperanza is a writer and sometimes her imagination takes her to a random place. The explanation for this is quite simple. Is waiting for a car to stop, a start to fall, someone to change her life.” “Marin, under the streetlight, dancing by herself, is singing the same song somewhere.
One example of this is in the chapter titled ‘Marin’: Most of the story is told through her point of view as she sees them but at certain times she narrates things she couldn’t have possible witnessed in person. This essentially allows the reader to live the tale and go through the emotions at the same time as Esperanza. Point of ViewĮach vignette is narrated in the first-person present tense by Esperanza, the protagonist. She realizes that it is up to her to make a change in her community and sees it necessary to return ‘for the ones who cannot out’. Esperanza plans to get out of Mango street and all of its misery but at the same time vows to never forget it. Positivity pokes through the fabric of misery until it eventually tears a hole through it. The tone is strategically controlled and evolves as the story progresses. Esperanza’s distaste for these social ‘norms’ is very apparent and strongly-expressed but is carefully balanced out and eventually take over by her undying hope for the future. The former is very apparent when the author dwells into the darker themes, such as how men beating their daughters and wives is viewed as normal behaviour within the community. The tone in ‘The House on Mango Street’ sways between critical and hopeful. It’s simple, flows like a poem and it fills your head with clear images. It’s the perfect example of the author’s writing style. “Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem.” In certain places Cisneros plays with rhymes, and comes up with sentences that you can almost sing, like this one: Instead, the message is always clear, without any room for misinterpretation.
#THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET FULL#
It’s packed full of imagery and metaphors but it never becomes too muddled. Writing StyleĬisneros’s writing style is unique in the sense that it’s poetic but without sounding too flowery. It improves the readability of the story and also makes them seem more impactful, allowing the emotions to come at you with greater impact. The sentences are often broken down into small samples, especially in the shorter vignettes, forcing the reader to take pauses. There are no quotation marks to be found anywhere in this book, which gives it more of an essay feel, though it’s not as formal. Cisneros’s way of structuring her text seems very experimental, even to modern eyes.
specific moments in time), their lengths varying from one or two paragraphs to several pages. The House on Mango Street is structured into a forty-four vignettes (i.e. Her expert manipulation of tone, structure and literary devices helps the reader to empathize with Esperanza and ‘slip into her shoes’, so to speak. The heavy-handed plot is supplemented by Cisneros’s brilliant writing style. Cisneros reaches deep into her own childhood and weaves a beautiful piece of fiction that deals with themes of caste, race, identity, gender, patriarchy. It follows the life of a 12-year-old Chicana girl, Esperanza Cordero, as she deals with the harsh realities of adolescence and life within the fences of an old-fashioned community. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros is a coming-of-age story.
0 kommentar(er)
