Summary Of Like Water For Chocolate By Laura Esquivel

Present in all of mankind, and every species in the animal kingdom, is the innate concept of war; the existence of good and evil and power and inferiority disturb our natural instinct of survival. Like Water for Chocolate is set during the Mexican Revolution, where life on the De la Garza ranch mimics life for the renegades. The author, Laura Esquivel, wrote this novel expounding her interpretation of war by providing a clear definition for the single most powerful and complex human tendency. This is accomplished through the three major themes of freedom, violence, and tradition.

When pressure and heat are applied directly to a people, the natural response is to form an emotionally intense need, stronger than any desire or want, that can be

Thereafter, “Each year Tita prepared [quail in rose petal sauce] in tribute to her sister’s liberation and she always took special care in arranging the garnish” (Esquivel ch.3). Tita then made sure to cook this meal every year to secretly commemorate the deviated obedience of Gertrudis. In taking her time to carefully arrange the garnishes, Tita daydreams of the day she, herself, will also defy the rules that keep her abound, and run away to change her reality for the better. This subtlety in the author’s writing implies that Tita does, in fact, possess the first symptom of war. When Rosaura told Tita that she would follow in the footsteps of Mama Elena and enforce the family tradition upon her daughter, Esperanza, “Tita was literally “like water for chocolate”-she was on the verge of boiling over” (Esquivel ch.8). The term “like water for chocolate” refers to the process of making hot chocolate in Latin-American

When Tita was wrongfully accused of sabotaging Rosaura and Pedro’s wedding, she received a beating like never before, and “[Tita] spent two weeks in bed recovering from her bruises” (Esquivel ch.2). Even Tita, being no stranger to abuse, was shocked by how brutally she was scolded that night, which suggests an increasing tension and a nearby turning point in the novel. Unfortunately, a parent may resort to child abuse when verbal communication fails, and expressing frustration through physical means appears as the only other option. Another reason for violence is if a parent already possesses their own feelings of guilt, self-hate, debilitating insecurities, or past experiences of abuse. In no way do these reason justify the cruelty, but they simply aim to provide an understand of it. After Tita becomes “like water for chocolate”, there is not a substantial amount of time before she instinctively boils over the edge. When Mama Elena instructs Tita not to cry and to continuing working upon hearing the news of Roberto’s death, “Tita felt a violent agitation take possession of her being: still fingering the sausage, she calmly met her mother's gaze and then, instead of obeying her order, she started to tear apart all the sausages she could reach, screaming wildly” (Esquivel ch.5). Reaching the watershed of the novel, and