The Shawl" And "the Things They Carried

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Rj Cisneros English 1302 Lisa DeVries 2/23/11 Fiction Essay In the short story "The Shawl" and "The Things they carried". The characters are going through a Hell on Earth. Both stories take place in a war zone, one on the battlefield and the other in a concentration camp. The character Rosa and her children are in a concentration camp. She is caring a infant named Magda. Rosa is trying to hide her in a shawl. The shawl to her is life. It was the only thing keeping the child alive. The camp was a horrible place to be if you were on the wrong side. Rosa would have to use her imagination to keep herself from not being able to focus on protecting her child. “Beyond the concentration camp, outside of the steel fence, "there were green meadows speckled with dandelions and deep-colored violets: beyond them even father, innocent tiger lilies, tall, lifting their orange bonnets". Past the steel fence was beauty or maybe heaven., but not the poor conditions of the death camp. The shawl itself evokes the single most powerful theme of the story: the magical provision of safety, nourishment, and succor within a hostile environment. Magda is seen as special, a child to be saved from the Holocaust. She is protected by a "magic shawl" that shields her from the Nazis, and nourishes her when her mother's breasts stop providing milk for her to live off of. It is a shawl that keeps Magda quiet when she must hide during roll call and protects her from the "bad wind with pieces of black in it, that made Stella's and Rosa's eyes tear". While they all carry heavy physical loads, they also all carry heavy emotional loads of grief, terror, love, and longing. Each man’s physical burden underscores his emotional burden. Henry Dobbins, for example, carries his girlfriend’s pantyhose and, with them, the longing for love and comfort. Similarly, Jimmy Cross carries compasses and

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