Across A Hundred Mountains Character Analysis

The breathtaking novel, Across a Hundred Mountains, by Reyna Grande (2006), is a story about a young girl, named Juana, and her older self as, Adelina. Juana became Adelina when she met a prostitute who was later killed in the book. After she died, Juana stole Adelina’s identity in order to cross the border to the United States, to find her father. Reyna Grande chose to elaborate the use of dualism, in order to express the parallelism between Juana and Adelina. This allows readers to make an assumption that later in the novel, the central characters will be brought together by fate, or that they are one person. In the beginning of the story, Adelina is looking at what she believes is her father’s grave, and she is with a coyote, who is described to be the same person who Juana meets further into the …show more content…
When Adelina is with the partially blind coyote, Reyna Grande writes, “Adelina didn’t look at his good brown eye. Instead, she looked at his left eye, the one with the blue film over it” (2). Juana too, was looking for her father and she had met the same coyote before, “Juana searched for weeks, looking for the man who had a blue film over his left eye” (Grande 191). Reyna includes repeating phrases such as, ‘blue film’ and ‘left eye,’which depicts a deeper connection between Juana and Adelina, by showing dualism in what the two characters have, say, or do. At one point, Adelina remembers the man with the blue film over his eye, as seen on the line, “A long time ago, she’d met a man with an eye like that” (Grande 16). The author made these connections to reveal that Adelina is the adult version of Juana, because her past has many connections to Juana’s present. A key detail of dualism is that, both Adelina and Juana gave their