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Themes In The House On Mango Street

Decent Essays

The book I read was “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros. There was many themes in this book. The two I want to focus on are Loss of Innocence and The Power of Words. Loss of innocence is when someone, sometime in there life suddenly realizes all the evil, pain, and suffering in the world. You can see lots of loss of innocence that Esperanza has throughout the book. For example at the beginning of the book in the chapter “Boys and Girls” Esperanza explains that the girls and the boys are so far apart that they live in separate worlds. In her words “The boys in their universe and we in ours.” At the beginning of the book she is so oblivious to the world, she thinks that the boys and girls live in different ones. Esperanza begins to lose her innocence in the chapter “Cathy Queen of Cats”, when Cathy tells Esperanza that she is going to have to move because of all the bad people moving to Mango Street directly after she had just moved in. This is when Espranza first started to realize that the world might not be as she first thought it was. She starts realizing that her world of candy corn and gumdrops might be worse than she thinks it is. Esperanza realizes that in Cathy's eyes she sees Mango Street is “getting bad” becuase of families like Esperanzas. In the chapter “Louie, His Cousin & His Other Cousin” Esperanza losses a little more of her innocence when she sees one of Louie’s cousins pull up in a stolen Cadillac and the cops book him. In the chapter “Marin”

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