Eleven By Sandra Cisneros Essay

Griffin Youngs
Period 1
English 10 GT
In the short story, “Eleven”, Sandra Cisneros depicts Rachel as an empathetic, wise, but socially misunderstood child who feels excluded by both her teachers and her fellow students. Cisneros utilizes various literary techniques throughout “Eleven” to help bring out the characteristics of the young and bashful Rachel, whose shyness keeps her from being able to express her inner brilliance.
A prominent literary technique shown by Cisneros throughout the story is imagery. Imagery is used many times by Rachel throughout the story to describe many of the things that Rachel herself is not old enough to understand how to get her point across, “A big red mountain.” and “Smells like cottage cheese” is how she describes the red sweater that agonizes her. What Rachel means is that the she loathes the sweater and finds it vile. Another example of imagery during “Eleven” is when Rachel is describing her theory about how ages stay with a person for the rest of their life, no matter how old they are. The imagery she uses to describe that is the rings inside of a tree, or

The tone of the story is important in making the story sound like it is being to through the eyes of an eleven year old girl, such phrases like “pennies rattling in a band-aid box” and “my whole head hurts like when you drink milk too fast.” All these are certain phrases that would be used in an eleven year old's life, bandaids for the bumps and scrapes, and the milk that your parents would make you drink. That is the tone Eleven sets, a young girl telling us her humiliating story while she is still a child.
Sandra Cisneros does an excellent job at using literary devices to characterize Rachel in “Eleven”. By using imagery, simile, and tone we can see that Rachel is a empathetic, bashful, wise, but still naive in her own ways. She is still only eleven and has a lot learn over her upcoming