Examples Of Injustice In The Bean Trees

Kelly Giannone
October 13, 2011
The Bean Trees Essay In the Early 1980’s political injustice and illegal immigration were big problems in America. These topics were also issues in the literary works The Bean Trees by Barbra Kingsolver and “El Salvador” by Noel Paul Stookey. Both works make many points of the wrong doings of the government and the hardships of Immigrants. In The Bean Trees, Barbra Kingsolver uses many literary elements throughout the novel on political injustice. For Example, her use of point of view showed political injustice when Ismene was kidnapped. Estevan and Esperanza’s daughter, Ismene, was kidnapped by the government as a way to coax Estevan or Esperanza to come out of hiding or to get them to give away names and places of other hiding immigrants. To the Government, this was a great plan to get what they wanted accomplished, and taking the child away didn’t have any negative effect on them at all. But, to Estevan and Esperanza, this was
The Element of Irony was also used in this song in the lines stating “there’s a television crew here from ABC filming Rio Lempe and refugees, calling murdered children a tragedy.” Irony goes well with this statement because El Salvador thinks it’s wrong to call murdered a tragedy, but to everyone else harming children is a very bad thing and usually people do everything they can to keep children safe. Noel Paul also uses Vivid Imagery to create a picture of Political Injustice. “There’s a sunny little country south of the border, where the winds are gentle and the waters flow,” paints a picture that visually El Salvador is a beautiful place. But, the line “breezes aren’t the only thing that blow,” shows that even though it’s visually nice, there is lots of war and violence from the government destroying towns and killing immigrants and other innocent