World Literature Essay
The Writer’s Presentation of Eating in Like Water for Chocolate and Kitchen.
Eating, an act that makes up a large part of everyday life in many cultures, strangely is one that is rarely mentioned in novels except in passing, let alone used as a tool to achieve things such as adding to or advancing the plot, developing a character, or to reinforce a key theme in the story as it is in both Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate and Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen. In this essay I will analyse a selection of key scenes in the two novels, in which the respective authors deliberately use lexis to convey their ideas and to set the required tone for the scene. In Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, she mainly uses this technique as a method of showing a character’s influences on other characters, or to represent a character’s feelings and/or thoughts more graphically. In Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen however, it is described as being able to reawaken memories of different characters, which is useful as a literary device because it allows Yoshimoto to show connections between various scenes, particularly scenes that foreshadow other scenes.
On page 34 Esquivel describes the scene before the wedding of Rosaura and Pedro, in which Tita and Nacha are making the wedding cake. She uses this scene to show the extent of the influence that Tita has on the characters around her, in this case how her emotions are so strong that they can be transferred to other people. The scene is very emotional. Esquivel achieves this effect through use of such lexis as “lamenting” and “cherishing” which both have connotations of longing and emotion, and also direct addressing of the reader with “oh yes, she had!” which evokes feelings of sympathy in the reader. In this instance, Esquivel creates an emotional atmosphere in order to reinforce the theme of love and its forbiddance, which is frequently addressed. It is significant in this excerpt because we find out that Nacha has been a...
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