Answered>Order 23120

Create a 10 page essay paper that discusses The Characters of a short story are often alienated and isolated figures operating on the Fringes of society.

Download file to see previous pages…

“I write short,” she wrote beautifully in 1983, “my words tight to the thread of the narrative.””

Her short-story “To School” is a clear example of her fiction work. The use of language is fluid and spontaneous. Everything flows quite easily. The point of view is from a mother who narrates how she takes her little daughter to her first day at school. She feels very excited about that experience. From the very beginning we can feel the high intensity emotions in the woman’s words. There is an empathic feeling all along the story, but we can also feel some kind of isolation in the mother’s psychological world. There is a sense of psychic loneliness in the woman’s vision of life that she tries to fill with the friendship of her little girl. Deep inside of her, there is a feeling of solitude, of isolation, that she tries to counterbalance with the loving figure of her little daughter.

Excitement surrounds every little aspect of this short-story from beginning to end: “S por este contacto de su mano que le late el corazn al saber que empieza su vida de trabajo en la tierra, y s que el colegio que le he buscado le gustar, porque me gusta a m, y que, aunque est tan lejos, le parecer bien ir a buscarlo cada da, conmigo, por las calles de la ciudad… Que Dios pueda explicar el porqu de esta sensacin de orgullo que nos llena y nos iguala durante todo el camino…”. (Laforet, 1970).

The mother feels a sweet emotion of empathy with the little girl, and this feeling is kind of symbolic as the mother becomes the daughter and the daughter becomes the mother at the end of the story. But the main point is made before the ending when the mother says to herself the following words while thinking about this experience of taking the little daughter to her first day at school: “Se me ocurre pensar que cada da lo que aprenda en esta casa blanca, lo que la vaya separando de mi trabajo, amigos, ilusiones nuevas, la ir acercando de tal modo a mi alma, que al fin no sabr dnde termina mi espritu ni dnde empieza el suyo…” (Laforet, 1970).

There is a symbiotic relationship between mother and daughter. And this relationship acts as a symbol in the whole story. It is as if they would become united again like when the little girl was deep in her womb. The mother wants both of them to be one again, and so she feels that school will be the missing link that will work the miracle of reuniting them. The mother is suffering from an identity problem when she thinks about her little girl, when she wants them to be one once again. At the end she takes the place of the little girl, and she becomes her little daughter, probably thinking about her own mother when she was taken years ago to her first day of class: “Pero yo quisiera que alguien me explicase por qu cuando me voy alejando por la acera, manchada de sol y niebla, y siento la campana del colegio, llamando a clase, por qu, digo, esa expectacin anhelante, esa alegra, porque me imagino el aula y la ventana, y un pupitre mo pequeo, desde donde veo el jardn y hasta veo clara, emocionantemente, dibujada en la pizarra con tiza amarilla una A grande, que es la primera letra que yo voy a aprender…