Between The Pool And The Gardenias Analysis

In the story Krik? Krak!, author Edwidge Danticat provides insight into the everyday lives of Haitians living during a tumultuous time period. Danticat, a Haitian native, understands the struggles that nearly all individuals endured passed on from generation to generation. Through the description of one's struggles, Danticat wants the reader to understand the dangerous power that hope entails.

Hope is a powerful tool that can provide a false sense of reality for one, which can result in harmful consequences. In the story “Between the Pool and the Gardenias,” Marie finds a dead baby lying along the side of the road. She takes the baby in and cares for her as if she were her very own child. Experiencing many miscarriages herself and running away from her husband who had many affairs with different women, the dead baby provided this women a sense of foreclosure and stability. “I always wanted a child I could cuddle, teach to speak and feed,” Marie

In the story “Night Women,” the mother claims that, “the night is the time I dread most in my life. Yet if I am to live, I must depend upon it.” She is a prostitute who must provide for her young child who is completely unaware of the work that his mother is involved in. The narrator tells her son a story about an angel coming to rescue him, bringing back his father. This sense of hope is what keeps the mother sane, and also provides the son something to believe in. When she walks back into the house after a night with Alexandre, the son exclaims, “Mommy, have I missed the angels again?” The mother, ashamed of her work but knows that her son is too young to understand why she does what she does, responds, “Darling, the angels have themselves a lifetime to come to us.” In doing so, the narrator is prolonging the time needed to tell her son the truth, which in turn gives him more time to get sucked into the dangers that hope