Before We Were Free Character Analysis

In what way has the change of environment (consider beyond the physical environment) impacted the character’s perspective, either positively or negatively?

In the book “Before We Were Free” by Julia Alvarez a young girl named nAita goes to an american school in the Dominican Republic with her cousin, Carla, she is close with her cousin and one day Carla gets called out of class and is told that she needs to leave for new york that night. Everyone is surprised by this news especially Anita. Then Anita finds out that her uncle is missing and suddenly the secret police invade her compound. With all these people that anita cared about having to leave or just disappearing she is left feeling freaked out. The family environment that she was in where her whole family was with her has now changed and this influences young Anita. Her twelfth birthday was coming up and all she wanted was to grow up and become more mature. There being gone made her realize that people leave and she was mature about it. So in a way them leaving had a positive influence on Anita. But you can expect that even with her newfound maturity she still would have difficulty dealing with this loss.

Besides the people that she is around that shape her environment there is also her physical environment where she lives, which

But in order to be more mature she needs to have something influence her in a way to realize that her childish ways were fine as a kid but now that she is growing up and becoming older she needs to start thinking about things deeper than herself. lucky for Anita that is exactly what happens. An external influence changes the way she thought, the way she acted it changed everything about her and by the end of the book the young Anita that we thought we knew had changed into a young woman who was extremely