In The Time Of The Butterflies Character Analysis

In the story, In the Time of the Butterflies, written by Julia Alvarez, a tragic incident occurs leaving one of the four sisters alive. Bélgica "Dedé" Mirabal, the last surviving Mirabal sister, dedicates her life to telling her sisters story. A young Dominican lady contacts Dedé for an interview, Dedé agrees and recounts the memories made with her family before they died. Dedé talks to the interviewer about her sisters, while she tells her story the story itself goes from her telling the interviewer of her past to the memories Dedé is now reliving during the interview.

In the book, the author uses the history of the Mirabal sisters as well as her writing expertise to paint her own narrative that accurately describes the culture the Mirabal sisters live in. The author uses many different writing elements like convention, imagery, and change in point of view throughout the story to deeply describe the life of the Mirabal sisters. Each chapter the point of view changes between the sisters, by doing that Alvarez tells every side of the sisters live in

The sisters receive a warning “Avoid the pass” (Alvarez 291), this moment in the story foreshadows the eventual demise of the sisters, which Minerva chooses to ignore. Minerva doesn’t know that this is a viable warning, Alvarez creates suspense in this moment and countless others throughout the story. Alvarez continues to create suspense when Minerva suspects that the soldier was a plant and declares “it was a movie scene that became suddenly, terrifyingly real. How foolish we’d been, picking him up on this lonely country road. I began chatting him up, trying to catch him in a lie...I’ll coax it out of him, I thought”(Alvarez 291). Minerva goes on to interrogate the soldier to find out if he be will the cause of her and her sisters