Cisneros, Style

In my last post I mentioned how I was able to read Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories quickly, which is thanks to Cisneros' unencumbered style and accessible language, the shortness of the stories and their ability to convey powerful emotions and vivid images succinctly, at least for the most part. But you can’t confuse a quick read with a simple read, because the more you examine this collection of stories, the more their sub-surface messages and clever narrative techniques emerge. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories is like a stylistic laboratory – it has a little bit of everything mixed into one powerful concoction. There are stories written in first and third person, stream-of-consciousness, little vignettes that capture a slice of someone’s life, and stories with a cast of characters and a plot with action. Some passages describe tender and beautiful scenes in poetic language and others are brutal or crass and use street language. But what makes this book great is not just the complex and varied style but the fact that there is always an underlying message – sometimes the message is clear and other times it’s obscured and you have to dig to get at it – you have to question each element in the passage and why it was written that way. It surprised me how much we were able to get out of our analysis of “The Marlboro Man” – how deceptively simple the passage was initially in comparison to what it had to offer. I would like to revisit other stories in more detail – even though I read them once I have the feeling that half of them is still lying under the surface.