Analysis Of Like Water For Chocolate By Laura Esquivel

Many people have grown up in a tyrannical environment, limiting their freedom and individual opportunities. Tita has been under the oppression of Mama Elena for her entire life and has never had the ability to feel love and happiness for a man who she wants. She meets with John who tells her how she should be living her life and why she is always so depressed with her actions and situation.John compares love to striking a match, and many sentences with passage two describe this action vividly. In the story Like Water for Chocolate the author Laura Esquivel uses literary techniques such as extended metaphors and specific word choice in order to describe the process of striking a match and how it is compared to a humans love for another. This creates a very passionate and romantic effect for the reader.

He tells this to Tita when tehy are sitting down together in his laboratory. “...she said that each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves; just as in the experiment, we need oxygen and a candle to help. In this case, the oxygen, for example, would come from the breath of the person you love; the candle could be any kind of food, music, caress, word, or sound that engenders the explosion that lights one of the matches.” This quote conveys the use of an extended metaphor in order to create a prodigous concept. He mentions that people have a box of matches in their bodies and that it need love and a person's breath to light it. This is repeated many times throughout the passage and gives us the romantic effect of one’s self needing another person to light the flame of happiness within them. Although this effect appears multiple other times during this passage, the evidence above clearly uses it in a romantic sense adding onto the overall effect of the