Fiesta 1980 Analysis

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资料 In both stories, a young boy who either narrates the story or offers his point of view through indirect discourse witnesses and becomes complicit in an extramarital relationship. In Diaz's story, Yunior, the narrator, sees his father cheating on his mother and senses that this familial transgression is potentially threatening to his family's happiness; he does not fully appreciate his father's motivations, and comprehends only partially how this adulterous affair might connect to his father's changing identity. In Vapnyar's story, Misha sees his grandfather, who seemed utterly unable to adjust to American life, develop a new self-identity when he embarks on a friendship with a Russian immigrant he meets in an English-language class. Both…show more content…
A simple plot frames the story: the family goes on an outing to attend a family party, the fiesta of the title. They take a newly purchased van, the smell of which causes poor Yunior throw up; so before they leave for the party, Yunior's father refuses to feed him. The van, a symbol of the family's rising prosperity in the US, is a source of pride for the father, but a nuisance to Yunior, whose sensitive stomach is a figurative barometer of his family's troubles: as their prosperity grows, so, too, does his parents' marital discord. Yunior is no innocent, and he is aware of his father's philandering. Yunior's knowledge is revealed in small flashback vignettes that interrupt the party scenes. He remembers his father taking him to the "other woman's" home, where, after Yunior has vomited in the van, the other woman cleans him and treats him affectionately. She then disappears upstairs with his father for an hour, during which time Yunior sits, "ashamed, expecting something big and fiery to crash down on our heads" (36). He quickly realizes, however, that this potentially devastating event is actually normalized within his father's life; his father begins to take Yunior and his brother Rafa to the woman's house repeatedly, with Yunior becoming a silent collaborator in the
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