Character Analysis: How I Became A Nun

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In the second half of the novella, How I became a Nun, César Aira the character as well as the narrator of the story provides the reader with an extraordinary ending that was not anticipated. However, before the ending unfolds, César Aira is able to demonstrate a theme of repetition that serves to foreshadow her own demise. This can be depicted as Aira states, “I don’t know if this is something that my readers have noticed, but time is always double: one kind of time always conveys another, as its supplement (79). In the beginning of the novella, Aira is given a strawberry ice cream cone that had been poisoned with cyanide. As a result, her father, blinded by rage, murders the ice cream vendor while Aira is hospitalized with little chance of survival, yet she miraculously survives. …show more content…

This is because the ice-cream vendor’s wife is able murder her by using ice cream to asphyxiate her. Thus, the frozen dessert that was once responsible for her hospitalization and was the driving force behind her father’s imprisonment as well as the death of the ice cream vendor has reappeared to claim her life. In addition, history can be seen as repeating itself as the father took revenge for not apologizing for selling a poisonous ice cream cone, while the ice cream vendor’s wife murdered Aira as a form of revenge for being the son of the man that killed her husband. Nevertheless, the theme of repetition appears again as Aira describes her friend Arturito, “He looked like a dwarf” (91). The character of the dwarf first appeared in the first half of the novella while Aira was receiving treatment in the hospital. Thus, this reference, combined with Aira’s description of “the pink of the sky at sunset” can be interpreted as time repeating itself

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