Summary Of Eleven By Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros, in her vignette “Eleven,” illustratively captures the voice of Rachel, an introspective and precocious eleven-year-old whose youthful insecurities and naïveté is displayed when, on her eleventh birthday, a red sweater is mistakenly and forcibly attributed to her, provoking a wide range of distressed and humiliated emotional responses. Through the use of low diction, unsophisticated and straightforward syntax, imagery particular to the experiences of an eleven-year-old, and tones that capture the struggles of growing older, Cisneros crafts the youthful and thoughtful individuality of Rachel as she experiences poignant humiliation and distress on her birthday. Cisneros showcases the delicate progression from childhood to adolescence

Cisneros refrains from the use of many polysyllabic and complex words that are uncharacteristic of an adolescent, instead using simplistic and broad language. By confining Rachel’s vocabulary to a basic and plain set of words, Cisneros effectively simulates the limited vocabulary of a child. The author’s precise choice of very informal and youthful words is shown when she writes that Rachel has “shoved the red sweater to the tippy-tip corner of [her] desk” (20). The phrase “tippy-tip” is characteristic of a younger and less mature child. Cisneros not only uses diction to evoke the the youth of Rachel but also to emphasize her emotions and feelings (20). Rachel feels “eleven years rattling inside [her] like pennies in a tin Band-Aid box” when describing her eleventh birthday (19). The verb “rattling” has a negative connotation, implying a feeling of anxiety and insecurity as Rachel tries to distance herself from the day of her eleventh birthday by wishing she was “one hundred and two instead of eleven” (19). Rachel describes the sweater that she is given as an “ugly sweater… [that is] all raggedy and old” (20). “Ugly” and “raggedy” have strong negative connotations that imply that the sweater is drab and tattered, which further allows the audience to understand the strong disgust Rachel feels toward the sweater (20). Through the precise use of basic and simplistic

The vignette begins with an interior monologue, revealing Rachel’s thought process syntactically as the sentence rambles on by changing ideas with each clause. When Rachel thinks, “what they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and three, and two, and one,” her ideas linger, simulating her thought process. Rachel begins the short story by introducing the main idea of her quasi-philosophical thoughts, that growing older is an accumulation of experiences and emotions rather than a discrete shift to a new age. The choice to use a cumulative sentence to express this reveals the clever purpose of using syntactic structures to emphasize the weight of Rachel’s ideas. Rachel’s sentence structures increasingly become fragmented, disjointed, and incoherent as the story reaches its climax. This is shown when Rachel puts on the sweater and thinks, “this is when I wish I wasn’t eleven, because all the years inside of me—ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, and one—are pushing at the back of my eyes when I put one arm through one sleeve of the sweater that smells like cottage cheese, and then the other arm through the other and stand there with my arms apart like if the sweater hurts me and it does, all itchy and full of