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‘Like Water for Chocolate’ is a text that I believe should be used in a classroom context for high school students because of the emotions, changes and challenges affecting teenagers as they do the central character in the text, and its uses of distinctive methods to demonstrate this. The relationships, Mexican culture, and literary techniques make it an alternative yet invaluable source in the classroom context. Most texts that students are expected to study in senior high school tend to be chosen by adults for their literary qualities that are not especially relevant to some of the challenge and emotions that teenagers face in their daily twenty-first century lives. Whilst the text ‘Like Water for Chocolate’ is not set in the culture we live in today nor is it a direct reflection teenage life, it certainly has particular components that make it relevant to high school students while still being as beneficial literary source as a Shakespearean text, just in different manners. While a story written about unrequited love is one of the most familiar, universal and almost over told stories ever written, the essence the author has brought to it using different methods bringing new life and to this commonplace story line. While the entire story is almost epic-like in its traditional plot, characters and the way it is told, techniques used by the author convey a deeply personal view of Tita De la Garza’s life even when written in the second person, by Tita’s great niece, Esperanza’s daughter. The way that Laura Esquivel uses magical realism in the text enhances the novel overall.
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