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Luis Alberto Urrea's Father Returns From The Mountain

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In “Father Returns from the Mountain,” Luis Alberto Urrea struggles with the trauma of his father's sudden death in a car accident. The story blends together real life events along with dreams which are presented “as reality.” (Urrea 1533) Scenes describe the aftermath of the wreck, both the damage done to the vehicle as well as the damage to Urrea's father. The way that the story fragments and shifts from one event to another and back again gives the reader a greater sense of what Urrea was going through than a linear story line might. After such a sudden and traumatic loss, everything in life feels out of sequence, sense of time is jumbled, and it can be difficult to make sense of it all.
Dreams are also “diamonds” and “broken mirrors.” (Urrea 1297) It is rare to have a dream with a simple, linear story line. This idea is represented not only in the metaphors used, but also in the sequence of events in the story. Dreams are a reflection of the subconscious, but they are not …show more content…

This is the way that a broken mirror reflects the scene in front of it. What a person sees in a mirror is true, as it is merely a reflection of what is placed in front of it, but when the mirror is broken, everything becomes distorted. The reflection is out of order. In the same way, a diamond refracts light into a spectrum. Light does not move through a diamond the same way that it moves through a pane of glass, because the truth isn't simple. It is often hard and it has many facets, like a cut diamond. For a person who has never been confronted by death, it is an easy thing to ignore. There is an illusion that each day will continue like the one before it, and that we will continue to move through life uninterrupted. However, after a traumatic loss, that illusion is shattered like the mirror, and we come face to face with our own

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