Victor Martinez's Parrot In The Oven

The title “Parrot in the Oven” is an extended metaphor. The metaphor is about a person’s ignorance. In the beginning of the story, many is a parrot in the oven, he is ignorant, (naïve) to the world around him. However, throughout the novel many grows up and is no longer a parrot in the oven. Victor Martinez’s “Parrot in the Oven is a bildungsroman, a coming of age novel where the main character learns a valuable lesson, because through picking chili peppers, almost shooting Pedi, and participating in a crime Manny realizes what kind of person he wants to be and there for grows up. First, Manny learns a lesson through picking chili peppers. Manny was at the chili farm picking peppers but he was not picking fast enough with Nardo. A van of immigration police pull up and the wetbacks started to run as some of them were caught because they were making themselves noticeable from running. A man found a sack full of peppers from one of the abandoned wetbacks row. He instantly showed people what he was doing. Nardo runs over to a bag as 2

Manny and Eddie were walking the mall and it was very cold. Eddie looks across the street and is eye balling this old white woman opening her car door, Eddie runs across the street and as the old woman is getting in her car he holds her door and snatches her wallet and pushes the old woman on the ground. “He rose and seeing her outstretched hand, slapped it down like a naughty child”. (209) Eddie starts to run down the mall very fast many starts to chase him, as Manny runs Eddie begins to get further and further. Manny stops and recognizes who he is and begins to slow down and stop. The police come to him and ask was he chasing that man who snatched that old lady purse, a black man says yes, and pulls Manny to the side and says let them worry about their own kind. Manny learned that he had been granted another chance he could have went to jail for a minute for someone