"Although I was raised in the Dominican Republic by Dominican parents in an extended Dominica family, mine was an American childhood." Alvarez quipped while she was interviews in American Scholar. Her fondness for Dominican Republic still shows though.

The stories she relate in her autobiography and in her various works of fiction offer glimpses of immigrant life which anyone who had to immigrate and immerse to a different culture with new sets of social demands and, on top of that, acquires a bicultural/biracial identity could easily identify with. These are but a few of the adjustments living in America for immigrants had to cope with.

Culture shock is one aspect of immigrants' lives that need some closer inspection. The acclimatization to a new culture, new language and new way of life for some immigrants could be a nerve-wracking even traumatic experience for some. The emotional rollercoaster characterized by uncertainties, fears and insecurities that plague the immigrant during the initial phase of immigration could be an overwhelming experience.

The Alvarez family's experience of fleeing Dominican Republic to seek political asylum in the United States is not an isolated case. There are a number of people who were forced to flee their country due to social and political unrest and settled in America indefinitely. Perhaps the stigma of being driven out of the country by force must have compounded the misery and the pain the Alvarez's felt in settling in the new country they were in. Fortunately, the majority of those who immigrate to America were not due to political reasons but as part of their personal decision to attain a better and more prosperous life for themselves and their families.

Alvarez starts her life story by recalling that her father belonged to a wealthy family who supported the losing political party during the revolution in Dominican Republic. Due to that, they felt the brunt of the winning party's anger. Since her mother's parents supported the winning political group they transferred to mother's family compound. Alvarez experienced growing up with extended families consisting of cousins, aunts, uncle, grandparents and maids. Alvarez's father is a doctor who became poor due to the revolution.

Their way of life in Dominican Republic was highly influenced by the American culture. They dressed in American clothing, ate American food and studied in American schools. All the families in the compound where Alvarez grew up were obsessed with America. To them, it was a picture of idealism and perfection.

Things took a dramatic turn in young Julia's life when her father decided to join the resistance movement. Police began to spy on them. Just as the police was about to arrest him, an American agent passed the information to the doctor a few hours prior to the planned arrest. To evade arrest, the family immediately got on board an airplane out of the country and headed to America.

When the plane landed on American soil, Julia thought she was finally home at last. America had been the ideal country she wanted for the longest time. Now her dreams were about to become real. All her American training back in Dominican Republic would finally have its deserving ending - to call America home.

But not so. Life was not a bed of roses for young Julia as she found herself feeling homesick most of the time. She longed to be with her cousins and relatives in Dominican Republic. She also wanted to go back to her way of life, complete with the luxuries accorded to their family. Her experiences with the new country America were not exactly a nightmare but they were not as ideal as her dreams either. She also felt alienated and discriminated due to her race. She missed her home and relatives. They lived in a small apartment. She found solace in reading books. The books diverted her from the painful reality she felt then. She later pursued degrees in literature and writing and gained respectable degree of success.

Julia Alvarez's book critically acclaimed book “How the Garcia Girls lost their Accents" was published in 1991. This fictional book as the author admits is derived from her immigration experiences.

The book is about four sisters who came to America and the hardships and conflicts they faced in the middle of two cultures - their country's and America's. Fifteen stories comprise the novel and depict various interesting characters as well as offer deep insights. Hispanic women specifically find the book a true depiction of their lives.

The book features four girls: Carla, Sandra, Yolanda and Sofia. Carla is the oldest of the four girls. She is responsible one and acts as the analysts of the family. She later became a child psychologist so that she can fathom her own loss of identity as a child. Carla is seen as the strongest and more independent among the four and she does not demand much attention just like her younger sisters. Sandra is the second oldest. She is the beauty of the family due to her lighter skin but has an eating disorder. She becomes obsessed with her weight in a society that equates thinness with beauty. The third daughter is Yolanda. Her story dominates the book. She's a writer, school teacher and poet. Sofia is the youngest. She is seen as the wild one. She fell in love with Auto while studying abroad. They had a son. And Sofia had to quit schooling

The stories do not only delve on their different personalities but also show how young immigrants journey through life as they make necessary adjustments to adapt to the new surroundings and culture. The girls lived in the United States but are brought up under the strict almost overbearing rule their conservative of Dominican Republic parents. They were expected to abide by Old world rules reminiscent of their previous country and set by their parents. The girls rebelled in the process.

The book mostly revolves around the problems encountered by the four daughters when they first set foot in the United States. Later, these same problems beset them as they returned to Dominican Republic on summer vacations as visitors. The girls have an extremely difficult time adjusting particularly in making friends: "Here they were trying to fit in America among Americans; they needed help figuring out who they were, why the Irish kids whose grandparents had been micks were calling the spics." (p.138)

Julia Alvarez's books and her very own life story reflect the triumphs and travails of immigrants in the United States. The conflict of the immigrants revolves primarily on their need and struggles to assimilate to the American culture at the same time retaining their inherent identity. Once the inner conflict is resolved, acceptance and acclimatization begin.

A: In "The Glass Essay"[1], which is part of her 1995 work "Glass, Irony and God"[2], Anne Carson confronts the reader with the situation and the thoughts of a possibly imaginary speaker and with the aftermath of being abandoned by a lover. Throughout "The Glass Essay", Carson makes very frequent use of painterly and very visual images, she makes the reader feel her writing and live through the flashbacks, memories, feelings of emptiness and desolation that her speaker experiences.

The text at hand forms a combination of autobiographical allusions to Carson's personal background, quotes from works of Emily Brontë and detailed descriptions of the mental processes of and reality around the speaker who is never clearly revealed as being female, but who generally appears to be a woman by stating "she liked the idea of me having a man" (p. 3) or "it was not my body, not a woman's body" (p. 38). Though being written in prose, the text is widely arranged in short stanzas of three lines each. This concept occasionally breaks up, however, when external quotes are inserted or in the first stanza of the text's last chapter "thou" (p. 31-38).

The essay is subdivided by 9 short headlines, each consisting of only a single word, in detail "I" (p. 1), "she" (p. 1), "three" (p. 2), "whacher" (p. 4), "kitchen" (p. 13), "liberty" (p. 16), "hero" (p. 21), "hot" (p. 27) and finally "thou" (p. 31). The subordinate textual parts each start with the corresponding headline word, with only two exceptions, the first being "I can tell by the way my mother chews her toast ..." (p. 21) under the headline "hero" and the second "The question I am left with is the question of her loneliness." (p. 31) under the headline "thou". When taking a closer look at the context and at possible ways of interpretation, a connection seems plausible. The term "hero" links the idea "of Emily Brontë's little merlin hawk Hero / that she fed bits of bacon at the kitchen table" (p. 23) and the speaker's father, a veteran and "former World War II navigator" (p.24) who now "suffers from a kind of dementia / ... / first recorded in 1907 by Alois Alzheimer" (p. 23). Both the bird and the father are reliant on the care of others, both depend on being fed instead of symbolizing the freedom the act of flying and, therefore, their nature once included. Their former pride is displaced with the pity of others. Furthermore, a second link can be made between the father and the superior being referred to as "Thou". The desire "to have a

friend to tell things to at night, / without the terrible sex price to pay" (p. 32) , just as Emily Brontë had her "Thou", the contrast of the father who was once so admirable and who now only causes compassion, using "a language known only to himself, / made of snarls and syllables and sudden wild appeals" (p. 26) instead of talking to her, these unfulfilled needs are an enormous strain on the speaker. The fact that "hero" and "thou" are not mentioned as the first words of the subsequent textual passages could hint at the problems that the speaker has relating to her father as a former hero on one hand and his decline on the other and to the superior being that was there to talk to Brontë in the night but does not come to talk to the speaker when she needs someone to talk to.

Analysing the imagery and the virtually visual methods Carson applies in her narrative, the striking fact about the images she uses is their relevance to the speaker's current state of mind. They vary from quiet, almost idyllic images when she tells that "on the edge of the moor our pines / dip and coast in breezes / from somewhere else" while the speaker is losing herself in a daydream about her time with her lover Law to violent and grotesque images such as "woman on a blasted landscape / backlit in red like Hieronymus Bosch. // Covering her head and upper body is a hellish contraption / like the top half of a crab" while the speaker is telling about nightmarish visions, likely to be caused by grief and resentment.

The overall tone and the dominating mood of the images remains rather negative, corresponding to the speaker's momentary attitude. She is still "thinking // of the man who / left in September" (p. 1) and spends her nights alone, feeling as if "night drips its silver tap / down the back" (p. 1) , a very cold and uncomfortable thought, while she longs for her own "Thou". She is about to visit her mother "on a moor in the north" (p. 1), but this plain and neutral expression is altered when the speaker reveals that "Spring opens like a blade there" (p. 1), carrying across the allusion of both beauty and fright, of fascination and dangerous quickness. When she arrives at her mother's home, she feels "as if we have all been lowered into an atmosphere of glass" (p. 2), the location suits the setting, she "can see dead leaves ... / and dregs of snow scarred by pine filth" (p. 3), even "black open water comes // curdling up like anger" (p. 3). When she goes out to walk in the moor, she feels that "the bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April / carve into me with knives of light" (p. 7). This scenery, seen from a different viewpoint, could be calm and peaceful, soothing and quiet, but that is not what the speaker intends to feel, she does not want to be soothed, she appears to bathe in her suffering with strange delight, to enjoy pain as it is.

In those rare moments when she remembers life as it was when she was still together with Law, she suddenly seems to experience comfort and once again witness "shadows // of limes and roses blowing in the car window / and music spraying from the radio and him / singing and

touching my left hand to his lips" (p. 8), but as soon as she falls back into reality, she is exposed to an "air which is suddenly cold and heavy as water" (p. 8).

The "Nudes" (p. 9) present an even more unpleasant series of images that strike the speaker in the morning when she tries to meditate, a habit she also acquired to get over the immediate affliction after Law's departure. They portray "naked glimpses" (p. 9) of her soul, snapshots of women in anguish and ache, with bodies torn to pieces and with phallic symbols penetrating their very flesh. In a horrible but stunning manner the Nudes confront the reader with their sorrow and their almost apocalyptic appeal to be seen. They have the urge to play their roles, as the woman on the hill who is "calling mutely through lipless mouth" (p. 9) or the "woman with a single great thorn implanted in her forehead" (p. 17). They all suffer for a purpose, they all appear very still and calm while they let the pain of physical and mental torture wash over them. The loss of love leaves a silent, numb pain, a pain that Carson lets the Nudes put on display. The fact that Nude #2 is "caught in a cage of thorns" (p. 17) while Emily Brontë's "poetry from beginning to end is concerned with prisons, / vaults, cages, bars, ..." (p. 6) is a reminder that the speaker explained earlier "I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë" (p. 1) which leads back to the desire for her own "Thou".

For the speaker, another transcription of finding "Thou" is "walking into the light" (p. 31), but in the end she finds that "with Thou or without Thou I find no shelter" (p. 35). She realizes that maybe Brontë's way, how much she may associate with her in other situations, is not for herself when it comes to feeling protected and safe, when it comes to carrying on with life, when she declares "I am my own Nude" (p. 35). The essay concludes in a rather neutral but possibly optimistic manner, the speaker depicts her last vision, Nude #13 which "walked out of the light" (p. 38). Particular importance lies in the actualities that "there was no pain" (p. 38) and that "it came at night" (p. 38), the very time she always felt she needed someone to share her solicitudes, the time of day when Brontë conferred with "Thou". The speaker is her own "Thou".

The tremendous visual power of Carson's images keeps the reader fixed in her domain of making poetry sensible. Through the depiction of colors, shapes, surfaces and textures, Carson has the ability to appease or to unleash fury with the reader as a witness and herself as the main aim. Her images are most effective as narrative devices, "she knows how to hang puppies" (p. 4), that Anne.

References

[1] Carson, Anne. Glass, Irony and God. Introduction by Guy Davenport. 1995. New York: New Directions. New Directions Paper book, Fifth Printing. "The Glass Essay“, 1-38

[2] Carson, Anne. Glass, Irony and God. Introduction by Guy Davenport. 1995. New York: New Directions. New Directions Paper book, Fifth Printing.

As other characters in the book were able to depend on Boxer to get the job done, many people have been able to rely on me in a situation. Besides being reliable, Boxer was one who would speak his mind when he thought differently as I would. In addition to these traits we share, we put much effort in the work we do. Though we may look different on the outside, Boxer and I are similar in our roles in society.

Boxer was someone who could be depended on, just like myself. When Mr. Jones and other men marched onto Animal Farm to take control, it was Boxer, as well as Snowball, who fought courageously to defend the animals. In addition to the Battle of the Cowshed, Boxer showed his reliability by fighting for the animals again in a fiercer battle with more farmers later in the book. Fortunately, the animals could depend on the Boxer to do whatever he could to protect the farm.

Like Boxer, I am usually someone who is reliable. When my friends need help in a situation, I am often there to help them out. For example, when one of my friends was failing miserably in his math class, he asked if I could help him bring up his grade. I agreed and stayed after school for days, tutoring him and encouraging him in the concepts he had trouble grasping. Thus, Boxer and I have shown to be reliable even through times that we had to go out of our way for.

Boxer and I know when to speak our minds in situations when we think differently than others. In the book, Napoleon would say Snowball was a traitor against the other animals and was an alliance of the humans. Boxer remembered otherwise and spoke out what he believed. He remembered how Snowball attacked the farmers trying to take control of Animal Farm and Boxer wasn’t too afraid to say what he thought. As Boxer spoke his mind then, and in other times of the story, I have spoke my mind when I believed in something different than someone else.

For instance, when someone asks to cheat off my homework, I tell them what I think. What I think is much different than the person requesting to cheat as I think it is a waste of writing since you don’t learn anything by copying answers. With these examples, Boxer and I speak our mind whenever faced with something we don’t agree with.

Boxer and I are also hardworking in what we do. In fact, one of Boxer’s personal mottos, “I will work harder,” shows just that. Boxer would wake up earlier every day with Benjamin to help build the windmill even when they didn’t have to at the moment. When the other animals couldn’t pull the rope hard enough to bring the heavier rocks higher up, Boxer used his power of three horses to use all his effort into helping the smaller animals out.