Eleven Essay
Period 4
The irony of life is that as you grow older you want to experience being young again, and when you're young all you want is to be older. This feeling happens to almost everyone and Rachel from "Eleven" first handedly experiences this feeling. In "Eleven" by Sandra Cisneros, Rachel uses literary devices like similes, sensory language, and hyperboles to prove that acting your age is complicated.
Rachel uses similes to show how age in her mind is completley different than in somebody elses. In "Eleven", Rachel talks about how you're never just one age, you're all the ages you've been in the past. But sometimes you wish you were older, even if you may not feel it. Rachel says, "Only today I wish I didn't have only eleven years rattling inside me like pennies in a tin Band Aid box" (5). Rachel compares age to Band-Aids which also symbolizes how they help cuts and bruises and with age you have more of them mentally and physically. As an Eleven year old, Rachel doesn't know everything and that's what she wants, to be mature and have more "Band-Aids" in her box. Also Rachel says, "Becase 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 one inside the other, each year inside the next one" (3). Rachel explains aging as layers, and once you add another, it doesn't mean you can't peal a layer back once and a while. That's how life is, layers. Layers don't dissappear, they bulid up on top of each other. Rachel sees how birthdays aren't what they seem and it's only a number to define her as something she's not.
Rachel uses sensory language to talk about age and how it defines her as something she doesn't want to be. In Rachel's mind being eleven isn't only eleven, it's also ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, and one. And as she grows older, she's more ages. She dowan't want to be eleven. Rachel states, "I wish I was anything but eleven, because I want today to be far away already, far away like a runaway balloon, like a tiny o in the sky, so tiny-tiny you have to close your eyes to see it" (17). Rachel compares time to a runaway balloon and this proves how Ravhel wants to be older tan se is. I can picture the ballon distincing itself from te ground and time speeding by as she grows old and just stares at it squinting more and more. The reference to her not wanting to be eleven goes