ipl-logo

The Little School Essay

1475 Words6 Pages

The Little School by Alicia Partnoy is an impactful memoir that honors her experiences during the Argentine military regime while she was deemed “disappeared.” The Argentine coup d'état overthrew Argentina’s President, Isabel Perón, and set its intentions towards suppressing any impulses of political dissent. The regime's leaders sought to eliminate leftist opposition and enforce its ideology on the population. They believed that democracy was demagogic and that the notions of the state must be redefined. They felt as if they had a moral obligation to cleanse society, and therefore penetrated the social consciousness of their opposition to instill order. Partnoy reproduced and distributed information about the economic situation and the repression, …show more content…

The minute details documented throughout this memoir impact the audience because they portray the effects of this regime on its victims. Partnoy describes how the smell of rain served as a reminder of being alive and reiterates how rolling her bread into balls brought her immense happiness. Even amidst the beatings, fear, and music drowning out the screams of the torture chamber, those were the things she remembered. Those are the things that got her through this horrific suffering. The specific episodes depict Partnoy’s memories and hindsight to fulfill her narrative but also leave gaps in the narrative of the impact of the Argentine regime as a whole. She draws attention to the fact that this is a much bigger problem than she is able to depict through her single narrative. Partnoy warns the audience at the start of the text to “beware” because “in little schools the boundaries between story and history are so subtle that even [she] can hardly find them" (Partnoy, …show more content…

She acknowledges that her perspective depicts her personal experience, so any reader should approach the story by consuming her personal account within the broader political context to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the impact of the regime. Partnoy says that she “[knows] just one little school” but it is important to realize “there are many ‘schools’ whose professors use the lessons of torture and humiliation to teach us to lose the memories of ourselves” (Partnoy, 18). Through this, she emphasizes that one cannot lose sight of themselves despite political pressures. Her depiction of her time at the little school serves to portray her struggles but also has a broader implication that demands the captors are held accountable for their actions during this

Show More
Related

  • Summary Of In The Time Of The Butterflies By Julia Alvarez

    1309 Words  | 6 Pages

    Though tragic, the death of this young revolutionary inspires Patria to join her sisters in the fight against Trujillo. She prays over the body of the young revolutionary, vowing that she will never again “sit back and watch [her] babies die” (Alvarez 162). Patria, having just witnessed the destruction of innocence, fears that her children will be next to die if Trujillo remains in power. His forces have now murdered an innocent child- a child whom Patria sees as her own- and Patria’s love for her real children provokes her

    Read More

  • Summary Of In The Time Of The Butterflies By Julia Alvarez

    1222 Words  | 5 Pages

    The book combines a modern interview and a series of flashback memories to tell the girls’ story; the author’s use of rotating perspective also helps the reader gain specific insights into each sister’s life during the Trujillo regime. The late twentieth century was a period

    Read More

  • Imagery And Themes In Roberto Bola単o's 'Amulet'

    1499 Words  | 6 Pages

    Bolaño proposes that not only was the movement suppressed, but with “incoherent” implies that it was unrecognizable, so that those who tried to maintain it were seen as “demented.” To Bolaño, it was “unnatural that [the students] should be quiet for so long” (178). The movement had quieted after the massacre, and in Bolaño’s opinion, the people should have spoken out. Through this, Bolaño suggests the need for the people to remember the story and tell it. Auxilio states that she is “the only one who can tell the story” (79).

    Read More

  • How To Struggle In Julia Alvarez's In The Time Of The Butterflies

    997 Words  | 4 Pages

    Imagine living during the reign of Trujillo’s oppressing regime in the Dominican Republic. The events the occurred during this time were horrific, whether it was torture, or the assassination of innocent people Trujillo and his men were always installing fear into the people of the Dominican Republic. In Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies she delivers a firsthand account of the horrors of Trujillo’s regime, and how four sisters contributed to the ultimate downfall of Trujillo’s power. There were four sisters, but one particular one had the most effect on leading the revolt, and that is Minerva Mirabal.

    Read More

  • In The Time Of The Butterflies Themes

    1490 Words  | 6 Pages

    Alvarez’s novel In the Time of the Butterflies bears testament to the monopolizing effects of dictatorships on society through the story of the four Mirabal sisters, Las Mariposas. Each sister shows a different side of Dominican culture, and in turn, the government’s parasitic effect on it. Even the church is not spared from these horrors: whether the church was aided or suppressed was irrelevant to Trujillo; the government must impact every facet of Dominican life. Despite condemning Trujillo, and by extension authoritarian governments, to the farthest extent, Alvarez is careful to avoid deifying the Mirabal sisters, a practice which she sees as one the of main forces that keep dictators in power.

    Read More

  • Rhetorical Analysis Of Night By Elie Wiesel

    474 Words  | 2 Pages

    (118). He maintains the motif of silence tied to death and terror, adding to the theme of the integrity of dissidence, a call to action. His audience is the world: future and present generations. He is not making a broad statement that ‘people’ must take action, but us; the listener and even himself, both contained in the subject ‘we’. He conveys this through his address to the audience and the context of the year, writing that in 1986 “more people are oppressed than free,” begging the question “how can one not be sensitive to their plight?”

    Read More

  • How Does Trujillo Manipulate The Working Class

    1151 Words  | 5 Pages

    Rafael Trujillo, the autocratic dictator of the Dominican Republic during the middle of the twentieth century, leveraged his status in society to oppress the working class for his benefit. In the novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez exhibits Trujillo exploiting the proletariat to gain wealth and power by creating a hegemony in which the working class knew that they were being oppressed, but did not do anything about it. Trujillo forced the people to idolize him in a narcissistic way, evoked fear in the working class, and used the secret police to give himself an upper edge over the proletariat. A country’s dictator will exploit their people to keep their position in power.

    Read More

  • How To Read Literature Like A Professor By George Orwell

    1092 Words  | 5 Pages

    Orwell reminds the audience that there is no escaping Big Brother watchful eye. He also addresses the Party’s use of torture as a way to force rebels into submission. “Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes”(Orwell 239).

    Read More

  • Confessions Of An Argentine Dirty Warrior By Horacio Verbitsky

    1154 Words  | 5 Pages

    Scilingo offers insight into the complex warping of ethics, religion, and morality by the Proceso to justify the torture and murder of alleged subversives; moreover, his accounts of visceral reactions and his weak justifications disprove the Proceso’s attempts at bastardizing religion. This tactic of religious and ethical distortion not only allowed the Proceso to violate human rights during the Dirty War but would also contribute to the military’s attempted warping of history after Argentina transitioned to a civilian government. Crucial to understand this, is the framework of a holy war. The Argentine military regime was ultra-conservative Catholic, as described by Pierre-Louis Le Groff . As a holy war, the regime believed that they had been entrusted to protect the state in the name of God.

    Read More

  • The Sandinista Front Summary

    1198 Words  | 5 Pages

    Specifically, Hodges focuses on the uniqueness of Augosto Sandino’s ideologies and how he founded them. Hodges’ work is similar to Coraggio in that they both aim to illustrate the importance the Sandinistas had on social aspects of the revolution. However, Hodges analyzes the philosophic facets of the revolution in hopes to resolve what he calls, “Interpretations of the Nicaraguan Revolution have been animated by undisguised political passions.”(x) He goes on to explain that, “Highly respected scholars, including Latin America specialists, are sharply divided over how to interpret the revolution.”(x). Hodges’ work takes up a daunting task, however, he efficiently combats this by investigating the philosophical

    Read More

  • Use Of Cruelty In George O 'Brien's Novel'

    1109 Words  | 5 Pages

    In the novel “1984” by George Orwell, the Inner Party uses cruelty in a politically and socially effective way by using methods such as torture, starvation, imprisonment, and room 101 as crucial motivation for those being tortured to not only confess but repent of their sins against the party. Furthermore, the use of cruelty by the Inner Party unveils both the victim and perpetrator’s inner conscience. The use of cruelty throughout “1984” by the Inner Party and O’Brien reveals how cruelty functions in the work as a means of oppression and a catalyst of subservience.

    Read More

  • The General In His Labyrinth Sparknotes

    463 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book “The General in His Labyrinth”, readers are given a fictionalized account of President Simon Bolivar, the General, and his fall from power. Marquez weaves historical fact and his imagined, detailed scenarios of Bolivar’s time as president that align with the facts, but are not verifiable. The book begins with a fatally ill, fleeing Bolivar, who had just learned of the public’s negative opinion and assassination attempts (Marquez, 7 and 12). Throughout the book, Bolivar reflects on his term as president and the failures he suffered while trying to gain independence for and unify Latin America, many times while suffering through a fever.

    Read More

  • Daughter Of Invention Analysis

    997 Words  | 4 Pages

    For the rest of his life, he would be haunted by blood in the streets and late night disappearances. Even after he had been in the states for years, he jumped if a black Volkswagen passed him on the street. He feared anyone in uniform: the meter maid giving out parking tickets, a museum guard approaching to tell him not to touch his favorite Goya at the Metropolitan”(Alvarez 95). While in D.R. her father went through a lot, he lost his brothers to the comrades that followed after the dictator and after the fear they created that followed him. To him his brothers blood is on his hands and that is an image and feeling that no one can ever erase.

    Read More

  • My Invented Country Analysis

    841 Words  | 4 Pages

    Isabel Allende’s, My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile, is her memoir about her native country, yet also sheds light to other important societal roles in Chile. As she passionately writes about her experiences, Allende makes it evidently clear that she loves her homeland, regardless of what troubles the country encounters. Nonetheless, it should be noted that her memoir is solely based upon her memories, and incorporates a sense of fiction to better help tell her story through vivid descriptions of the natural landscape and/or the people she interacted with. Her book was compelling to me as her passion for her country was expressed through her usage of language and descriptive experiences that portrayed her emotions during

    Read More

  • Essay About School System

    751 Words  | 4 Pages

    Why the school system is bad - Arshia Education is very important for everyone and it will only get more important. Schooling is just plain bad. It used to serve a purpose, like the heart in a person 's body, but now it is basically just boring students more and more. Nowadays at the end of the day, we all just want to go home.

    Read More

More about The Little School Essay

Open Document