In Eleven Sandra Cisneros uses metaphor to describe how people age and how you never completely shed who you were in the past. When Rachel is discussing how she doesn't feel eleven in her eleventh birthday she says: “What they never tell you is when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two and one.”(1) She expands on this by saying: “The way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit inside the other, each year inside the next one.”(1) This metaphor, especially the one about tree trunks, is extremely accurate to how we age. Every year a …show more content…
And this doesn't happen instantly after 365 days the person and the ring grow gradually throughout the year. Like Rachel said: “When you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don't.”(1) When you're eleven you’re eleven year old personality or your eleventh ring is the biggest part of you and it's the part that everyone sees, but the other 10 years or rings are still in there. And that past is necessary because although you may be bigger and stronger with age, without that past you just a fragile cylinder of bark. When your cut or hurt those younger layers begin to show themselves again at the cost of your structural integrity. So ultimately, like a tree, people grow throughout their lives and who you were when you were younger, although less