Excursion towards the Evil Eleven

“I’m eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.” In the short story, Eleven, Sandra Cisneros’s uses descriptive techniques such as similes and imagery to describe the fear and journey towards becoming eleven, as well as forming a childish atmosphere through the eyes of Rachel. These techniques assisted her in characterizing Rachel and helped her to engage the audience by making them feel as though they were in direct contact with her. Prominent characteristics of Rachel that were enlightened due to these literary techniques included Rachel’s fear of turning eleven, her precocious behavior, her anxiety, and her animosity towards celebrating birthdays.

In order to relate the abstract ideas of Rachel to concrete examples Cisneros used a literary technique known as similes. “Eleven” includes this frequently used technique with the intention to elucidate certain ideas, feelings or thoughts via other tangible items. “Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or the rings inside a tree trunk…” By relating an onion or tree trunk to age, Rachel helps clarify to the audience that her meaning of aging is not only to be the age one presently is, but also to comprise of his/her past years as well. “O

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By her saying that her head hurts like when drinking milk to fast, the reader has a better understanding of how much her head really does hurts because imagery helps the reader imagine themselve drinking the milk so fast and feeling the pain afterwards.

In order to amplify the reader’s vision of certain situations within the short story, the author makes use of various types of imagery such as olfactory, tactile, auditory, and kinesthetic imagery. ” With this descriptive in-school atmosphere, the reader understands how it can feel to have had that dreadful sweater and how much hatred towards that sweater Rachel possessed. By using similes, environment/atmosphere, and various types of imagery the author was successful in characterizing Rachel.

All in all, the author used literary techniques in order to illuminate Rachel’s character throughout the short story. “There’s a cake Mama’s making for tonight and when Papa comes home from work we’ll eat it. “I wish I was anything but eleven, because I want today to be far away like a runaway balloon, like a tiny o in the sky…” The hatred of the day in which she turned eleven is so immense that she wishes it were so far away. “-and pushing at the back of my eyes when I put one arm through one sleeve of the sweater that smells like cottage cheese. “I move the red sweater to the corner of my desk with my ruler. By the means of linking nervousness (an intangible feeling) to a concrete idea of “rattling pennies”, Rachel’s feeling of anxiety is illuminated and the audience can feel her concerns. ” In this short excerpt Cisneros uses both auditory (the animal noises) and kinesthetic imagery (the body shaking like hiccups) in order to thoroughly portray Rachel’s situation in class as she is crying. The atmosphere of any literature is one of the key elements in bringing the reader into the life in which the writer places them in, and Cisneros uses this technique to her advantage as she places the audience into a fifth grade environment. ” Cisneros uses olfactory imagery of the cottage cheese with the aim of generating a putrid smell of the sweater. Cisneros use of imagery was winning in that it allowed the reader to form mental images of what they read with the use of concrete details that please all five senses. I’m sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.

Approximate Word count = 963
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

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