Barbie Q Essay

369 Words2 Pages
Both “Barbie-Q” by Sandra Cisneros and “Sea Oak” by George Saunders share an underlying theme of poverty, however the mode upon how the characters in each individual story deal with poverty is very different. In both stories the characters manage to escape their economic status in different ways. In “Barbie-q” the two girls affected by poverty wish to have nothing more than Barbie’s to play with, a fire in the toy house enables them to get damaged babies at a very low cost. They do not attempt to get jobs or even ask their mothers for more money instead they fashion clothes out of old socks and even imagining complicated scenarios that include a doll that they don’t have “Every time the same story. Your Barbie is roommates with my Barbie, and my Barbie’s boyfriend comes over and your Barbie steals him, okay? Kiss. Then the two Barbie’s fight. You dumbbell! He’s mine. Oh no he’s not, you stinky! Only Ken’s invisible, right?” (Cisneros 1). They escape poverty by imagining and pretending that they are not poor instead of facing the fact. This differs from “sea Oak” which is about a young male stripper who plays the male role in the family, they live in poor projects where there is a lot of turmoil. The happy go lucky narrator is “haunted” by his aunt, who when alive worked double shifts and never complained, she never even got married because she had to work, however when she came back to haunt the narrator she was very nasty “You , mister, are going to start showing your cock. You go up to a lady, if she’ll pay to see it, I’ll make a thumbprint on the forehead. I’ll try to get you five a day, at twenty bucks a pop. So a hundred bucks a day.” (Saunders, 112). She gives the narrator and her family an escape to poverty. In lieu of escaping using their imagination like the girls in “Barbie-q”, the narrator of “sea oak” is going to prostitute himself in order to
Open Document