Eleven By Sandra Cisneros Summary

In the story “Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros is a story told as from the eyes of an eleven year old girl. The narrator at times, gives the reader the feeling you are really reading a story written by an eleven girl and not a grown woman. One can tell this by the author’s word choices throughout the story. Like the narrator repeatedly uses the word “stupid”, which to me is a word an eleven year old would really use. As she describes multiple things as “stupid”, such as describing her classmate Sylvia Saldivar. There are also times though that narrator appears wise beyond her years. She knows that even though she is eleven, she does not have that much life experience yet. As she says “I wish I was one hundred and two instead of eleven because if
I was one hundred and two I’d have known what to say”. She wants the experience that comes with age, but she also knows that she still just has the experiences that go along with being eleven years old. The red sweater episode of the story is a conflict that impacts the narrator. She feels humiliated by the experience with the red sweater. She feels even more humiliated, because she cries in front of her class. She tries to tell herself it will be better once she gets home to open presents and eat cake. But she is still embarrassed over the ordeal. The narrator reveals that we carry each age experience with us throughout our lives. We do not outgrow each age, but rather carry it with us. As the narrator perfectly describes it “the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one”.