Summary:
House on Mango Street is a book that is about the reading level of a second grader. It is a book that is easy to read, but to understand it. That is a whole other ballgame. In the novel the main character Esperanza struggles with this whole idea of house.
House on Mango Street is a book that is about the reading level of a second grader. It is a book that is easy to read, but to understand it. That is a whole other ballgame. In the novel the main character Esperanza struggles with this whole idea of house, and how it is just that.
The novel starts off on Loomis Street on the third floor. So right there you know it is an apartment and her family probably pays rent. So there fore it does not belong to them. Then a little further in the novel she says that her parents said, that someday they would move into a house. A house with running water and no leaky pipes, and real stairs that were inside the house, not hallway stairs, a basement and at least three washrooms, with grass, tress and no fence. Something that I noticed was that she uses the word house, not home. When I think of the word home. I think of a bed, a roof a good place relax and a place to go when there is nowhere else to go. The word house to me means a roof with a toilet and four walls.
When Esperanza and her family move into the house on Mango Street. I think she looks at it as another place that they are just living in for a while then they will move again in a year. The thing is she knows that her parents bought the house. When people point to her house and say, you live there. She says that, it's not my house. As the novel come to an end she still has the same feeling, but a little different. She says that it is not her house until it is fixed. I know that her family is not really rich, and I think that has something to do with her power. This is her power to lie to herself. In the end she talks how she will move and people will miss her on Mango Street. If people miss her than that is her home. She knows that in reality it is where she is growing up and will probably be there the rest of her life. I think Esperanza has the power to lie to herself to make herself feel better and keep embarrassment out of her face. She has this dream of this special house with stairs inside and a lawn, three washrooms and a basement. Mango Street is everything opposite of that. All of her life she was led on by this dream and she got excited and it seems like she is lying to herself to continue dreaming.
I noticed in the novel that Esperanza refers to trees a lot. She says I want trees at my new house and always refers to them. Like the public and private metaphor she uses. Here is another instance of her lying to herself. When she talks of the ugly small trees that the city planted. It just seems that any time she refers to the House on Mango Street it is not her house, or it does not have this or that, she compares everything to her dream. A dream that her parents put in her head and a dream that turned into a girl who cannot except reality and is now living and drowning in her own lies. I don't know why she cannot just accept reality and stop lying to herself and others.
This is the complete article, containing 584 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
