Ciara Hancock English 10[Type text]
Julia Alvarez’s Style
Julia Alvarez was originally born in the Dominican Republic. She uses experiences and her backgroundevents that have happened in her life to write about. Her personal experiences are most evident in her essay “My First Free Summer”, her poems, “Exile” and “All American Girl”, and her short story “Antojos”. She uses all different genres, so this makes Alvarez’s writing style is easy to recognize. She Julia Alvarez uses theme, imagery, and figurative language to create her style.
The theme in Julia Alvarez’s poems and stories are the same.In Julia Alvarez’s stories and poems basically all have the same theme. The theme of her writing is the stories and poems are about her leaving home. She is leaving her home, the Dominican Republic; somewhere she has lived her whole lifeher home to go to the United States. She also talks about how she wants to be an “All American Girl”. She just wants to fit in and not have people know that she is from another country. As she said in her story “All American Girl”, “I wanted stockings, make up, store bought clothes; I wanted to look like an American Girl; to speak my English so you couldn’t tell I’d come from somewhere else.”
Imagery is a big thing in Alvarez’s writing. In “Exile”, she had said “Weeks later, wandering our new city, hand in hand, you tried to explain the wonders: escalators as moving belts; elevators; pulleys and ropes; blonde hair and blue eyes: a genetic code.” This quote puts a lot of images into your mind. When she says those things you see everything she is talking about, from the escalators to the blonde hair and blue eyes. Alvarez put imagery into all of her writing.
Alvarez also uses figurative language in her stories and poems. For example, “Rocks in your mouth, language of English.” The type of figurative language would be imagery for this quote. In this quote the narrator is saying that English is a hard language to learn. She uses all kinds of figurative language in her poems and stories. When she uses imagery and similes it makes things easier to understand.
With her use of theme, imagery, and figurative language Alvarez has become an interesting author. All of her work shows her readers how things really are. She is saying and expressing things we have all felt before, like from moving to one place to another. No matter how close or far away everyone knows how that feels trying to fit in. Julia Alvarez shares her experiences in her life in hope people find her writing interesting and that they can understand what she’s saying and how she feels.