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Similes In The House On Mango Street

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The House on Mango Street Analysis Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, is a book of poetry, about the coming of age of a young Latina girl named Esperanza told from Esperanza’s point of view. Esperanza is an observant and descriptive. These traits make her an excellent narrator because of her ability to breathe life into the story. Throughout the book, Esperanza deals with her Latin heritage, her family, growing up and other teenage topics. But what makes The House on Mango Street stand out from other books is its intimate details. Cisneros’ use of effectively depicting Esperanza’s raw vulnerability and Esperanza’s observative nature makes the reader come to feel very connected to her. In the first chapter of the book, Esperanza shares a story of when she used to live in a flat on Loomis street. When a nun from her school …show more content…

When talking about her lack of suitable best friends, Esperanza says, “Someday I will have a best friend all my own. One I can tell my secrets to. One who will understand my jokes without my having to explain them. Until then I am a red balloon, a balloon tied to an anchor” (Cisneros 12). By describing herself as a “red balloon”, Esperanza invokes images of an object that is free and light. When she adds the red balloon is “tied to an anchor”, the balloon is no longer free. It is now restricted to the limitations of the anchor, much like how Esperanza's lack of a suitable best friend restricts her dreams of having one. Unfortunately, The House on Mango Street is a thin book with only seventy pages and short chapters that consist of two pages or less. Cisneros’ greatest accomplishment is efficiently writing a book that completes its purpose with minimal words. Cisneros gives each line significance that gives it the emotional heaviness of a thicker book and by the end of the book, readers become attached to the world she has

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The House on Mango Street, written by Sandra Cisneros, incorporates many literary devices that assist the book. Cisneros writes with irony and imagery, which affect the meaning in her writing. She uses dramatic irony every so often in the book, for example in “What Sally Says” she writes, “her father, whose eyes were little from crying, knocked on the door and said please come back, this is the last time. And she said Daddy went and home” (Cisneros 93). Earlier, Sally’s father had beaten her for talking to a boy.

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In Sandra Cisneros’, House on Mango Street, Esperanza’s yearning for freedom is supported in Darius & the Sky. Specifically, the vignette begins by saying, “you can never have too much sky” (33). Esperanza’s vision of the sky is symbolic of offering freedom and a realm filled with opportunity. Equally important, is the sky’s role in shaping Esperanza’s identity. At the beginning of the novel, Esperanza uses imagery to depict how she is “a red balloon, a balloon tied to an anchor” (9).

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The House on Mango Street is a coming-of-age novel by Mexican-American writer Sandra Cisneros. It deals with a young Latina girl, Esperanza Cordero and her life. She grows up in Chicago with Chicanos and Puerto Ricans. It is a 1984 coming of age novel. The novel has become a New York Times Bestseller and also been adapted into a stage play by Tanya Saracho.

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The House on Mango Street is a coming-of-age novel that was published in 1984 by a Mexican-American author known as Sandra Cisneros. Sandra Cisneros's first novel was House on Mango Street, which is a story that is based on Cisnero’s own experiences. This story follows the main character, Esperanza Cordero, who is a 12-year-old Mexican-American girl growing up in a Hispanic neighborhood who has moved into a house on a street named Mango Street. The story shows how the neighborhood and community play important roles in the shaping of the different characters such as Sally, Esperanza, and Alicia. Firstly, Alicia is a girl whose mother has passed away leaving her to pick up and play with the women of the house doing the cleaning, cooking, and taking care of her

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In “The House On Mango Street”, Cisneros uses symbolism and repetition to communicate the theme that in order to find self definition, one must struggle with society’s ways. Esperanza portrays the area’s underprivileged women who want to improve their lives. She aspires to change the stereotypical life of a woman in her community, she seeks independence. Esperanza endures a lot of various transformations during the novel as she searches for identity and adulthood, looking for dependency and self-reliance from society’s ways rather than looking for solace and confidence in herself. Once she starts to realize the disparity, Esperanza develops.

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In “The House on Mango Street” Cisneros, the author, characterizes the protagonist Esperanza in a way that shows her growth from a young girl who is consumed by feelings of sadness about her position in life, to a woman, forced to grow up too fast, who has found what she wants in life and has the confidence to go after it, leading us to conclude that Esperanza is a dynamic character who changes on multiple levels throughout this

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Cisneros has said that she began writing "The House on Mango Street" after reading about "the poetics of space" at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. There, she learned that everyone in the class but her understood their consciousness in terms of "house" metaphors--the "house" of memory, with its different rooms, for example. Cisneros, who moved repeatedly as a child and never really felt that she belonged to the dingy houses she lived in, rejected these ideas. However, "Mango" is very much about the search for identity, as symbolized by Esperanza’s search for a house. When she is ashamed of her house, she is ashamed of herself.

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The House on Mango Street is set in a poor, primarily Hispanic neighborhood. Author Sandra Cisneros creates an atypical, yet easily digestible world for the reader to experience while learning about Esperanza’s childhood. The culture of her environment influences Esperanza’s development as she becomes a young woman, and contributes to the book’s driving theme of self-empowerment. Mango Street is the source of Esperanza’s growth through her childhood, and it hides sadness and longing underneath stereotypes of Hispanic people. The characters that live in the broken-down neighborhood all seem to represent pigeonholed views of Latino individuals.

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Cisneros makes Esperanza sound and describes symbolism and expresses how meaningless it was for Esperanza’s house on Mango Street. Esperanza feels like her house and Mango Street wants to keep her and trapped her forever with no freedom or opportunities, Esperanza has said before she’s too strong for Mango Street and someday she will leave Mango Street and finally one day Mango Street would let her be free. Readers are supposed to understand how Esperanza sees and feels, her being in Mango Street living in the small red house, and see that Mango Street is a place where Esperanza does not feel good living in and can’t wait to go really far away from Mango Street. Esperanza would understand maybe one day the transitions of a child to being a teen and then adulthood where everything changes inside you and what makes that would be, for example, your ethnicity and most likely your body changes

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Esperanza’s Perspective “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros, is Esperanza’s story that is told in first person by Esperanza herself. Sandra Cisneros uses only one or two pages for each chapter and along the way we learn more about her family, friends, neighborhood and Esperanza herself. In some scenes she uses humor and other scenes sadness, these scenes are in introspection form.

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In the book, The House on Mango Street, Esperanza is portrayed as a young innocent girl that drastically changes over the course of the book. Esperanza is new to mango street and encounters many challenges but also positive experiences that she is able to take away from mango street. In order for Esperanza to transform as a human it was inevitable for her to face the struggles on mango street. As Esperanza matures throughout the novel she experiences three major developments that shape her future through the awakening of maturity, responsibility and her awakening of her interest in poetry.

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The book is about a girl who is unsatisfied with her house on mango street.. Through the use of literary elements, Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street clearly illustrates the idea that if it's a human dream, then it is possible if you work very hard. Body Paragraph #1: In the chapter entitled “The house on mango street,” Cisneros explores the idea that the girl is poor and when someone works hard enough for a human dream they can achieve it. For instance, when she is talking about the house she wanted to have, the narrator Esperanza states, “They always told us that one day we would move into a house, a real house that would be ours for always so we wouldn't have to move each year.”

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In the House on Mango Street, Esperanza is seeking for an identity of her own. In her current neighborhood, she struggles with economic, cultural, and gender based barriers to personal growth, and she believes that changing her surroundings is her solution; however, she realizes that to discover her identity, her ultimate destination is a home in the heart. The house on Mango Street was one that was the opposite of what Esperanza had dreamt her entire life. The house is, “…small and red with tight steps in front and windows so small you 'd think they were holding their breath... bricks...crumbling in places, and the front door...so swollen you have to push hard to get in". (Cisneros 5)

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The House on Mango Street is a touching and timeless tale told in short vignettes. It tells the story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago. Her life, and the lives of the people around her, are laid bare to the readers in this touching novella. In the beginning, Esperanza is not accepting of herself. Her family’s poor financial situation, the sadness of the people around her, and the problems she faces in her daily life make her very cynical.

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She however is very reactive to this situation, she doesn’t tell anybody what happened, she steals late passes, hides in an abandoned janitor closet, and eventually ditches school. That example shows how irresponsible she is. House On Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, is about a young girl who moves into a new house with her family in Chicago Illinois in the early 1980’s. Esperanza is not a very happy person, especially after the year she had at the house on Mango Street.

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