Question

In at least 200 words, explain how the author uses characterization to express and develop one of the themes in this story. Use details from the story to support your response

Answer 1

for "'Agua Viva,' A Sculpture by Alfred Gonzalez"

Step-by-step explanation:

The author uses characterization to develop the theme of victimization. Fredo is a victim to the bullying of young kids and his own isolation. Throughout the story, we watch as the author uses the characterization of Fredo to develop victimization by having Fredo "wake up" to reality. For example, the young neighborhood boys pick on him, " He looked up to see three boys throwing things at him that he could not immediately identify. Nor could he recognize the boys. Were they his son's friends? Where was his son? "Filthy Fredo, filthy Fredo, ya ya ya-ya-ya,"they shouted." When the neighborhood boys do this it wakes Fredo up to reality and he starts to realize that he is being victimized by these young boys. Later when he goes into his house he then realizes how he has become a victim to his own emotions and self-caused isolation. This is when Fredo realizes this, " In the end—after a year—they released him as "traumatized" but "harmless," Here this displays how he has become a victim to his own emotions and he has a traumatic past. Then when he looks in the mirror, " And he turned and gazed in the mirror—what he saw there stopped his heart. In the mirror was the head and shoulders of a man who had not bathed, shaven, or shorn his hair for five or more years and who had not seen himself in that time either." When Fredo looks in the mirror this is when he truly realizes what he has become a victim of over all these years.

Answer 2

In a "Granny and the Golden Bridge"

Claribel Alegria's Granny and the Golden Bridge is set against the backdrop of the civil war El Salvador in the 1980s.

In it, Manuel tells a story about his insane grandmother, an vivacious old woman who spends all day cooking to regale the government troops stationed around the Golden Bridge. The bridge is latterly blown up by rebels, and it is expose that they had received intelligence about the bridge's cover from Manuel's Grandmother. She dress up herself as a brothel-owner to escape capture, and the last image of her. In the story is when she is paddling a canoe upriver, carrying munitions for the rebel forces.

Jack Aqueroses's "Agua Viva; a Sculpture by Alfred Gozalez; tells the story of Fifty Fredo, a mentally disturbed hermit who control scrap metal and hasn't shaved or bathed in fives years. Aqueros uses long, run-on sentences to convey Fredo's manic, compulsive inner world, a world as impenetrable as the scrap iron creations he builds in his workshop. A violent encounter with some neighborhood boys is his first human contact of any kind in years, and it seems to be the first step towards returning to society.