Sandra Cisneros Strengths

Strength And Weakness

Strengths and weaknesses are important human characteristics that authors incorporate and use to create a certain mood, tone, or simply to contribute to the plot. These three authors, Lisa Fugard, Sandra Cisneros, and Gabriel Gracia Marquez, use strength and weakness to set the mood and convey the meaning through each different point of view of which their stories are told.

Lisa Fugard is the author the “Night Calls”, a story told by a girl who just lost her mother and is slowly losing her dad in the process. The mother was his strength and losing her, he found his weakness, the bird. It constantly drew him back to grieving and made him unable to move on. “I knew it was my father going down to the river. For ten nights the heron called and my father followed.” Instead of being angry about him lying and saying the bird has died, she understood, which could be considered a strength. She realized the loss and pain he was facing, but she also realized she needed to try to help him. Ironically, it was the daughter who had to be strong for her dad, instead of vice versa. Since it is told from the daughter’s point of view, it shows both of

their grief, but how she handled it different from her dad and what effect it had on their relationship

Sandra Cisneros Wrote “Geraldo No Last Name”, a short story from her book The House On Mango Street.

A Mexican woman, Marine, goes to a dance and sees a man she was dancing with killed in a hit and run. She has no idea who he was but yet it bothers her. “Only Marin can’t explain why it mattered, the hours and hours, for somebody she didn’t even know”. The strength and weakness factor is shown abstractly in this story. Sandra is showing the struggle of Mexican immigrants and how strong they have to be for what they go through. Marine though, feels weak and angry that he never could get back to his family or whoever he had left because she understood what he went through just as she went through a similar things. Yet her strength is shown when she knows she would have to move on though she couldn’t

forget.

Gabriel Gracia Marquez is the author of the magical realistic story, “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings”. Fear is the weakness factor that makes all of the village people, including Pelayo and Elisenda, who house the mysterious old man, to treat him unequally and as an animal. Even when the old man makes them money just for showing himself, they use the money for themselves and leave him in the terrible conditions that he was in. “With the money they saved they built a two-story mansion with balconies and gardens and high netting so that crabs wouldn’t get in during the winter, and with iron bars on the windows so that angels wouldn’t get in.” In this story, Gabriel uses weakness to show how humans act in their fear and greedy nature. Though theres no specific target in this story, weakness lies within everyone and thats one inference a reader should get from it.

As shown through these three stories, fear and weakness can be manipulated by the author to set a different moods and create a certain tone to imply and support their plot for the effect they’re going for. In “Night Calls” weakness and strength supports the process of grieving and loss. In “Geraldo No Last Name” strength is the main factor thats shown in an abstract way but referring to all immigrants and their struggles. Finally, in “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” weakness is shown abstractly about human nature and their weaknesses to the unknown. Weakness is an everyday human characteristic but strength is more of a rare one, through these stories one can see how difficult it is to find strength in such situations as Marine, the daughter, and the old man.