Analytical Essay

The Two piece of literature that I have chosen for this paper are The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, and Salvation written by Langston Hughes. Both of these pieces have meaning to me in more than one way. I am going to explain the way that the authors connect to their writings and how the stories relate to them. I will also go over both of the author’s usage of literary devices that I learned in this course as well as the way that I relate to these pieces. I will end this paper with a comparison of both.
I will begin with The House on Mango Street. One of the main literary devices that are used in this story is tone. The tone in this story is kind of a mix between discontentment and defensiveness. In the beginning the tone is discontent; but there are many things that narrator points out that make it seem sad. For example after the narrator says that her family moved into the house on Mango Street but then she says, “But even so, it’s not the house we’d thought we’d get.” (Richard Abcarian, 2007) The reader can feel Esperanza’s sorrow.   Esperanza then talks about the house on Loomis where she felt embarrassed at the way the nun from her school said, “You live there?” (Richard Abcarian, 2007) The narrator becomes very upset and the tone changes drastically from a calm innocent child to a person who feels that they have something to prove.
Sandra Cisneros, like her main character Esperanza, was a Mexican- American and moved a lot as a child. She went to the University of Iowa and attended the Writer’s Workshop there. She said that,”…My classmates were from the best schools in the country. They had been bred as fine hothouse flowers. I was a yellow weed among the city’s cracks.” (Richard Abcarian, 2007) The House on Mango Street is a story that she wrote that, I believe, mimics her life as a child. I read the book and after reading her bio I can see where all the passion that she put into the story came from.   As written in her biography at Grade saver,...