Comparing Like Water for Chocolate to The Homely Child
Chloe Tokazowski “The Homely Child” and Like Water for Chocolate are both incredibly similar when you closely compare their plots and literary elements. Both include similar motifs and main events that occur throughout the story. Both authors use hyperboles to make the stories more interesting and intriguing. In “The Homely Child”, Hector is mistreated by his parents and sister for a long time and they eventually just ignore him. In contrast, Tita was talked down to by her mother, who always brought negative attention to Tita. At the dinner table, Pedro compliments Tita's extraordinary dish by saying “It is a dish for the gods!”, and Mama Elena is quick to reply, “It's too salty” (Esquirel 51). This goes to show that Tita spent so many laborious hours on a dish that tasted amazing but still, it wasn't good enough for Mama Elena. Tita's sisters, Gertrudis and Rosaura, love Tita unconditionally and so do the servants of the house. Hector, who not only gets talked down to by his family, also gets ignored by all of them. “No Matter how he tried, however, Hector found himself consistently unable to join in meal time discussions.” This shows how even after Hector attempts to engage in conversation at the dinner table, they still ignore him every night. Hyperboles are a common literary device in both “The Homely Boy” and Like Water for Chocolate. Hyperboles help exaggerate a specific point the author is trying to convey. In “The Homely Boy”, Hector over exaggerates his parents mistreating him. He thinks that his family is out to get him when it's pretty much just in his head. “This was an invisibility far more literal than anything Hector had thus far experienced, a condition so profound that the boy could switch the goblets of his dining family directly under their noses and still remain unseen.” The cause of this could just be because he's the youngest or because of his sickness, but throughout the whole story he worries about his family forgetting him, and it gets the best of him. In Like Water for Chocolate there's an abundance of hyperboles. Most of them have to do with food. For example, “This explains the sixth sense Tita developed about
