How Are the Protagonists in ‘Like Water for Chocolate’ and ‘the Outsider’ Trapped?

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How are the protagonists in ‘Like Water for Chocolate’ and ‘The Outsider’ trapped? ‘Like Water for Chocolate’ is a novel written by Laura Esquivel and was published in 1989, originally in Spanish. This novel tells a story about a girl by the name Tita, who wants to marry her lover, Pedro Muzquiz, cannot because of her mother, Mama Elena’s strong belief for the family’s tradition where the youngest daughter must take care of their mother until the day they die. ‘The Outsider’ is a novel by Albert Camus and was published in 1942, originally in French. This novel follows Meursault’s life as an independent young adult. His mother passes away in the very beginning of the story, but afterwards Meursault does not show any grief or a sign of any sadness and carries on with his life. Everything seems to be fine until he unconsciously kills an Arab. There are two parts in this novel, the first part is before he killed the Arab and the second part is after he killed the Arab. The main characters from these two novels are two very different people in many ways, but have one thing they have in common which is the idea that they are both trapped by their own society, but somewhat not trapped when in a certain place or moment. Throughout this investigation these two novels will be closely examined and also compared and contrasted. On the very first page of ‘Like Water for Chocolate’, the narrator talks about being sensitive to the onion. By doing this the narrator introduces the main character, Tita as she would cry a lot even when she was in her mother’s womb. As it says in the first chapter, when Tita was born on the kitchen floor and when the water had dried up, the kitchen floor was filled with salt, which is impossible because the water from the womb is not salt water. The salt is from all the tears that were shed by Tita in her mother’s womb and the salt

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