Blog Post #1: Metaphors

In “ The Monkey Garden” Cisneros uses metaphors to convey the theme of life being different from a child’s point of view. She starts using this technique at the very beginning of the vignette, by saying “The monkey moved-to Kentucky- and took his people with him (Cisneros 94)”. A child who had more encounters with the monkey than its owners would have seen the situation of the family moving as the monkey’s decision and the monkey toting around the humans, while people older than her would know that the monkey was a pet and left because the humans left. Cisneros also uses this device to draw the vignette to an end. After Esperanza is embarrassed by her friend Sally and a group of guys, she “wanted to be dead, to turn into the rain, my eyes melt to the ground like two black snails(97-98)”. Cisneros mixes in metaphors and similes to show us what a child would think in that situation. Esperanza’s reaction reveals that a kid would just want to disappear in the event of embarrassment instead of finding a way to deal with it. This shows that a child would not know how to cope with this new emotion. In both instances Cisneros uses a metaphor to shed light on how a young kid views the world around them.