The House On Mango Street And The Things They Carried

Growing up on Mango Street, girls had to take two steps backward to take one forward. Just like ballroom dancing, women let men take the lead and sacrifice an extra step to continue moving on the floor. When Sally escaped from her father and married the marshmallow salesman, she had to give up her youth and femininity.

Hook: In the coming-of-age novel, House on Mango Street, the main character Esperanza narrates the story through her perspective of the situations she encounters as she grows older in her new neighborhood.

“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.” This quote by Helen Keller claims that in order to thrive, one needs hope and confidence. Esperanza happens to have both-- at least she eventually comes to have both. In her series of vignettes, “The House on Mango Street,” Sandra Cisneros writes of several of Esperanza’s experiences to show her evolution as a child into a woman. Esperanza starts as an insecure child, before beginning to gain confidence, and finally gaining that confidence. This evolution of Esperanza’s can be seen in the vignettes, “A Rice Sandwich,” “Papa Who Wakes Up Tired In The Dark,” and “Beautiful and Cruel” respectively. These experiences and vignettes that Cisnero covers

In all aspects of life, women are pressured to be someone they are not. They are put in situations that force them to chose a path of life. In “The House on Mango Street”, Esperanza is forced to think about leaving Mango Street in the future, because she is surrounded by women who are pushing her to become an adult.

Marin said that “she’s going to get a real job downtown because that’s where the best jobs are, since you always get to look beautiful and get to wear nice clothes and can meet someone in the subway who might marry you and take you to live in a big house faraway.” (Cisneros,26-27) This mean she will change her life with man not her own. In this story’s background society is woman should work in a house and man should go outside and make money so this is like man should protect woman. Also, another character that similar with Marin is Rafaela. She is beautiful so her husband didn’t let her go outside of her house. Then, she never left outside and she just look outside through the window. This can be said that women rely on men and leave all responsibilities for men. In the past, this thought, same as them is very normal but as time passes, most people agree for gender equality. Then, literally, gender is being equal. But, Esperanza thought that woman should live in recognition of these thoughts and consider them after she met normal woman in that

In life many people set goals for themselves. For some people it maybe a goal such as obtaining a high test grade and for others it maybe to one day own a race car. Everybody has a different outlook on life and everyone has different goals in which they one day hope to achieve. The people who achieve their goals are those who are motivated and determined to do so. When these goals are achieved it is then when you are a hero to yourself.

In the book The House on Mango Street, author Sandra Cisneros presents a series of vignettes that involve a young girl, named Esperanza, growing up in the Latino section of Chicago. Esperanza Cordero is searching for a release from the low expectations and restrictions that Latino society often imposes on its young women. Cisneros draws on her own background to supply the reader with accurate views of Latino society today. In particular, Cisneros provides the chapters “Boys and Girls” and “Beautiful and Cruel” to portray Esperanza’s stages of growth from a questioning and curious girl to an independent woman. Altogether, “Boys and Girls” is not like “Beautiful and Cruel” because Cisneros reveals two different maturity levels in Esperanza;

When I grow up, I want to be a black gum tree. Black gum trees are known for their internal strength. Instead of dwelling on outward beauty, they spend more time focusing on their inner growth and developing their core. Only after they have achieved this goal can they produce beautiful fruits that draw animals near to them. Any surfaces that the berries touch are stained as to say, “I was here and made a permanent difference.” After they have utilized their outward influences, they use their internal scars and hollow places to protect the animals surrounding around it. If human lives were to reflect the concepts of the black gum tree, governments, individuals, and communities would be radically transformed. While this is a beautiful image,

When first coming to this country as a Hispanic American you may face a lot of difficulties and find more problems than the average white American. Hispanic people go through different adversities and have trouble overcoming them. In The House on Mango Street the main character Esperanza is the one that narrates the story, she explains what it is like to live on Mango Street. She shows the readers that living on Mango Street is perceived as a terrible area, if one were looking from the outside in. But those that live there feel that they live in fair living conditions. The fact is most of the people who live on Mango Street don 't know what it 's like to live outside of mango street. In the story, they show a lifestyle that most Hispanic people deal with especially the ones that come to America and have to figure out how to make ends meet. In The House on Mango Street, the novel has many themes and problems, such as gender inequality, stereotypes, and language barriers. With short stories like "Aria" and "the myth of Latin Woman," a solution is always found. Sometimes there is a simple solution and other times, it is not so easy to find, or there 's just no solution to solving the characters problems and they are still trying to look for results.

1. Identify an instance where Cisneros uses powerful imagery. Explain the effect of that imagery upon the reader. Remember that imagery can appeal to any of the senses, including sight, sound, taste, smell, or touch.

Young men who are sent to a war learn the reality in a very harsh and brutal way. Both the stories, ‘The Red Convertible’ and ‘The Things They Carried’ portray the life of a young soldier and how he psychologically gets affected from all the things he had seen in the war. Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried,’ is more specific on the experiences of a soldier during a war where as Karen Louise Erdrich focuses more on describing the post war traumatic stress in her short story ‘The Red Convertible’. One thing similar in both the narrations is the Vietnam War and its consequences on the soldiers. From the background of both the authors it’s easy to conclude that Tim O’Brien being a war veteran emphasizes more on the

Change In The Things They Carried a war novel by Tim O'Brien, we are told many short stories compiled to make a whole. I want to emphasis on the importance of the chapter "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong". In this chapter we are introduced to the character Mary Anne. She shows the changing power of Vietnam, that a sweet innocent young girl can come into this land and be forever consumed by her surroundings. The speaker show us this through character action, character description, dialogue and metaphor; this enhances the literary work by showing us that the soldiers will always be a part of Vietnam no matter how hard they try to get away from it.

“Tim O’Brien is obsessed with telling a true war story. O 'Brien 's fiction about the Vietnam experience suggest, lies not in realistic depictions or definitive accounts. As O’Brien argues, absolute occurrence is irrelevant because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Mary Ann’s induction into genuine experience is clearly destructive as well as empowering” (p.12) Tim O’s text, The Things they Carried, details his uses of word choice to portray his tone and bias. Tim O’Brien uses Martha to represents the idea of home and all it attendant images. He also uses letters and quotes to convey his image. Despite the fact that women assume a little part in The Things They Carried, it is a critical one. The Female characters Martha, Mary Anne Bell, and Kathleen Cross all affect the lives of the soldiers . Tim O’Brien uses the female role to portray his view and thoughts on his true war story which depict the lack of morality.

In The House on Mango Street, the vignette “The Family of Little Feet” first seems like a random story, and is often disregarded, overlooked, and labeled “insignificant” because the story is oriented around three pairs of high-heeled shoes that arealmost immediately thrown away. As a result, seems like an arbitrary story that isn’t connected with the other vignettes. However, after careful reading, the story is relevant to the story since the shoes are a symbol that helps us further understand the characters and develops a theme.

The novel Across a Hundred Mountains by Reyna Grande is a story about two young girls and their struggling journey to find happiness between two conflicting and distinct worlds: the United States and Mexico. Juana on one side wants to get to the United States, or “el otro lado” as mentioned in the novel, to find her father who abandoned her and her mother after leaving to find work in the US. On the other hand Adelina escapes from her house in California to follow her lover to Mexico. The girls form a bond in the most unexpected of places, a Tijuana jail, and quickly form a friendship that will connect them for the rest of their lives.