Pablo Neruda And Laura Esquivel: A Literary Analysis

Pablo Neruda and Laura Esquivel: Using Literary Techniques to Portray Transcendence Humanity has forever been intrigued by the bewildering power of love. Artist of all types, writers, painters, singers, philosophers, have attempted to explain the origin of love and why it is such an important part of our human lives. Looking at two important works like Pablo Neruda's 20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair and Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate, the authors choose to depict stories of true love, passion and longing to portray the feeling of love. These two works go beyond realistic human feeling and events to do so, and use literary devices such as magical realism, natural imagery and exaggerated emotion in their writing. They do so
In Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, our author writes about love's longing and despair, as synthesized in his staple phrase: “Love is so short, forgetting is so long” (Neruda, “Tonight I Can Write” 28). The choice of using these types of literary devices is made as a statement of intangibility: love is much more than reality. In Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate the reader is exposed to the magic of love, and its magnificence. Through the stories of Tita's encounters and emotional dilemmas, Esquivel sends her reader on a supernatural journey through her story's magical realism. Events like Gertrudis' erotic escape from the family ranch and the eventual eternal spiritual unification of Tita and Pedro, prove to the reader her admiration for the complexities of
This shows that the two things, recipes and romance, are closely tied in the story. At the start of Tita's story, she is playing with the “dazzling display made by dancing water drops dribbled on a red hot griddle.” as she “was singing and waving her wet hands in time, showering drops of water down on the griddle so they would 'dance'”. Her sister Gertrudis joins her, and “[throws] herself into it with the enthusiasm she always showed where rhythm, movement or music were involved” (Esquivel, 8) The admiration of the water in the quote shows how closely the feeling of joy and nature are for the girls: they are happy, singing, dancing, and the water mimics them. As the story goes on however, Tita's life becomes more tangled, and the magical realism becomes more powerful. As Tita lays at night watching stars and thinking of Gertrudis, and Esquivel