Essay On Hope In A Wall Of Fire Rising, By Krik Krak

Is it really possible to have hope even through the roughest of times? Hope, a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen. In Haiti living a stress free, careless life is impossible. Everyone is poor and living in poverty. This lifestyle affects all aspects of the Haitian life. In the book Krik Krak, a series of short stories, the author Danticat uses juxtaposition to create indifferent characters that in return create the overall mood of hope throughout the book. Specific examples of indifferent characters creating the overall mood of hope include a desperate woman, a restless mother, and a depressed father.

In the short story Between the Pool and the Gardenias, Marie the narrator is a woman who has suffered many miscarriages. Marie being so desperate for love, has become delusional. She finds a dead baby, cradles the child as if it were one of her own, and tells it about all of her losses. “she looked the way that I had imagined all my little girls would look, the ones my body could never hold”(Danticat 92). But after reciting her mother’s prayers she

Guy is frustrated that he can not provide the security and future that he had always wanted for his family. “ I remember my father who was a very poor struggling man all his life. I remember him as a man I would never want to be”(Danticat 75). After Guy talking to his wife, he comes to the conclusion that his son and wife are better off without him, where he then commits suicide. “Little Guy was breathing quickly as he looked at his father’s body on the ground. While the formann draped a sheet over Guy’s corpse”(Danticat 78). Guy longed for his freedom so bad that he killed himself to reach it. This change of the character seeing no future for his family and himself, to sacrificing himself so his son will be at more chance to succeed conveys the mood of