Hayden Griffin
Ms. Jill Jackl
English III Honors
8 March 17
The Tortilla Curtain: Literary Analysis
A satire is the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice or folly. Carl Hiaasen, a famed journalist, novelist, and columnist corroborate: “[A] good satire comes from anger. It comes from a sense of injustice, that there are wrongs in the world that need to be fixed…” The Tortilla Curtain exemplifies just that. It illustrates it by showing all of the fallacies of American beliefs while also tossing our views of immigration around from chapter to chapter.
The publication date on this book is 1995 but this novel is still as relevant and as controversial today as it was 22 years ago. The Tortilla Curtain…show more content… I am not sure if this accusation is leveled at Kyra and Delaney (who recycle and are mostly vegetarian) or América and Cándido, who have an impossible litany of horrible things happen to them. These characters all feel real to me—not as in I might meet them on the street, but I recognize their complexity, hypocrisy and humanness. Perhaps in some people’s vision of liberals, they aren’t quite so hypocritical. Or perhaps some readers don’t like that Cándido and América are uneducated and that Cándido occasionally hits América. It is a well-documented fact that as unemployment rates increase, domestic violence also increases. Cándido and América’s story of the corrupt coyote rings true with many nonfiction I have read as well. Perhaps some readers also don’t realize Boyle’s mirroring technique and instead see a heavy-handed portrayal of have and have nots—where I saw a satirical layering of the bitter struggle for survival versus the first-world problems in the United States which cause us…show more content… This veiled column (pg. 211-215) is a masterpiece of showing and not telling, but its complexity reverberated for me because Delaney was “telling,” letting Boyle show us so much about this character and the world and culture he lives in…which happens to closely resemble early 21st century America. The mere fact that Boyle names the young, pregnant, beaten, besieged teen in the book América, is a constant reminder to the reader of what our country used to be, and how it contrasts to what our country is now, without the author ever having to say a word on that
