Write an essay of 1,100 to 1,200 words (double spaced, 12 pt. Times New Roman font, 1” margins) on a topic of your choice, or on a combination of the themes of Luisa in Realityland. Choose at least two vignettes and two poems from the book to analyze and compare the following topics:
Dictatorship and politics, fear and oppression (including torture and death);
Resistance and rebellion;
Exile;
U.S. political and military intervention (in El Salvador);
History (personal and collective);
Gender relations (and inequality);
Self-Identity and feminism;
Social and economic differences (inequality/injustice);
Religion and beliefs (including prejudices);
Family ties, customs and traditions (including prejudices too);
Childhood, curiosity, and imagination.
I hope the list above will help you generate ideas for your essay. Vignettes and poems from the book should be used as reference in the essay, bearing in mind the following:
1. The experience of growing up in a war-torn Central American country, and the constant presence of horror and death under a dictatorship
2. Luisa, as a child, serves as a central consciousness. She shreds the assumptions of the society she is observing with her persistent questioning
3. Much of the power in the novel comes from tension created by the balance of the comic and tragic
4. The author not only deals with poverty, but we are presented with the socioeconomic cause of it. (For example, Memo's and other poor children's hunger, and in "The Mejía Dogs," where the great Danes thrive while the children starve)
5. The tradition of revolutions, massacres, and guerrilla fighting is alien to your experience in the U.S., but it's been a part of everyday life for children in Central America. (For example, in Luisa in Realityland a child sees his father decapitated)
6. A number of sections in the novel celebrate daydreaming—the conscious and the subconscious/the world of wishes and everyday disappointments. (For example, Luisa’s alter-ego and muse, the Gypsy, and also the myth-making uncles)
7. In addition to depicting hunger and violent death for children and their families, the book also depicts psychological death ruining the lives of young people too devastated by events to cope with the opportunity for a better life when it presents itself, as in "Felix"
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