The House on Mango Street

Objective:

Understanding the Literary Elements

Facts

    

full title

·

The House on Mango Street

author

· Sandra Cisneros

type of work

· Novel made up of interconnected vignettes

genre

· Coming-of-age story

language

· English

Facts

      

narrator

· Esperanza Cordero

point of view

futures.

· Esperanza narrates in the first-person present tense. She focuses on her day-to-day activities but sometimes narrates sections that are just a series of observations. In later vignettes Esperanza talks less about herself and more about the people around her. In these sections she is never fully omniscient, but she sometimes stretches her imagination to speculate on the characters’ feelings and

tone

· Earnest, hopeful, intimate, with very little distance between the implied author and the narrator

tense

· Mostly present tense, with intermittent incidents told in the future and past tenses

setting (time) setting (place)

· A period of one year · A poor Latino neighborhood in Chicago

protagonist

· Esperanza

Literary Elements

 Major Conflict :  Rising Action :  Climax:  Falling Action:

Major Conflict:

 Esperanza struggles to find her place in her neighborhood and in the world.



Examples?

Rising Action:

 Esperanza desires to leave her neighborhood, observes other women, and finds newfound sexual awareness in her friendship with the sexually adventurous Sally.

Climax

 Esperanza’s tumultuous friendship with Sally leads to her emotional and sexual humiliation.

 What happens to her, to prove this to be true?

Falling Action

 · Esperanza returns to her less mature friends, understands that she does in fact belong on Mango Street, and settles on writing as her way of both escaping and accepting her neighborhood.

GROUP WORK: Hand out

 Esperanza and Me.

 Open Mind