Ester Lucero

Cassie Essary Tim Petete Ethnic American Literature November 12, 2009 Angel’s Psyche in Ester Lucero One of the most fascinating aspects of any story is the formation of it’scharacters. The way the author chooses to describe them, give them personalities, is how the reader will see their lives. A character’s psyche and the way he thinks about events around him change the way a reader perceives the story. Authors have an amazing chance to shape and bend a story to fit what they want it to be through the characterization of the people they write about. If an author is incapable of making characters believable and understandable, the story won’t survive. In Isabel Allende’s “Ester Lucero”, Angel is described in a way that makes the reader understand his impulses and desires, even if they areof a completely foreign nature to the reader. Allende is an extremely skilled writer that used her ability to make a character believable to her advantage for this story. Angel’s psyche is one of the most interesting elements of this story. When he returns from the war in the jungle, he seems to be in a state of inner turmoil. He’s searching for something to help him deal with the war and the things that he did and saw happen there. When Angel sees Ester Lucero for the first time, he believes that he is seeing a mirage. Nothing could possibly be that perfect, and he has to search her out. When he finally finds her, he is “shamed by his unseemly passion for a child who still had not reached puberty” (Pearson 10) as she is 12 and he is 30. Angel gives the impression that he picked Ester as the object of his interest because she is unavailable, therefore he never has to worry about what might happen if he did somehow attain her. Although he is attracted to her, he never makes a move to do anything about it, other than “watching her walk by on her way to school; attending her when she caught the measles; providing her with vitamins…;teaching…the multiplication tables”

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