Third Quarter Blogs: Final Blog

In her story, "Eleven," Sandra Cisneros states the troubles of a young girl, Rachel, beginning her path to adolescence at the start of her eleventh birthday. She uses a narrative to describe Rachel's embarrassing day at school, a metaphor involving a red sweater, and simple diction to convey the raw meaning of Rachel's emotions and show her desire to be older than eleven. Cisneros employs a very humiliating and frustrating tone in order to show how much Rachel suffers from coming of age. Her tone is really to young people who are turning eleven, but it can apply to any age, where the feeling of wanting to be older but remain young is a contradiction.

1. The girl cries because she realizes the full extent of what growing older is. She sees that growing older involves carrying the weight of all the previous ages with you. You don't just shed your previous ages and the emotions and milestones that came with them. Rachel talks about "the need to cry like if you're three," and "saying something stupid" that is a mark of ten years of age. The girl cries because this overwhelms her. She just wants to move on and be older but that's not the reality.

2. The red sweater is a story of immaturity and to show how Rachel is still tethered to her younger ages. The sweater is a sign that Rachel is still young, and no matter how much she wants to grow older, she's still just starting adolescence. It's showing the theme of how growing up has layers. You're not just eleven. You're an accumulation of all of the ages leading to eleven. It's a theme to remember always. Human beings aren't linear. We are the product of our life experiences.

3. "Eleven" makes sense in this story because you're starting a new "decade" in your life. It's typically the time of middle school and when you start to hit adolescence. It's a confusing time in life, and this is implied in the story. You want to be taken seriously as an adult, but that's not possible. It's the start of something new, but you still have the immaturity that is associated with children. It's a difficult age to deal with, and Rachel's emotions are thus conveyed accurately.