Autobiography Of The Brown Buffalo And Ana Castillo's So Far From God

Great Essays
Both Oscar Zetas Autobiography of the Brown Buffalo and Ana Castillo’s Novel So Far From God are examples of the use of magic realism and mythology in Chicano/a literature. However, both pieces of Chicano/a literature display their own unique interpretation of self-identity.
Beginning with the plot of the Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Oscar is a lawyer at the East Oakland Legal Aid society. He drives to his office in downtown San Francisco only to discover that his secretary, who usually does most of the work for him, has died over the weekend. With the overwhelming realization of his working environment, Oscar flees and decides to start a new life. He throws away his lawyer’s license, fires his therapist, and spends the rest of the day
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He interweaves his own life story with that of his narrator, so that fact and fiction become a complicated web of meaning. He engages the real and the imagined and turns the narration into a magic realism narrative in order to find his sense of self-identity.
Magic realism also plays a huge role in Ana Castillo‘s novel, So Far From God when it comes to finding self-identity. The story traces the life of a family of Chicano women and the events that change their lives and, eventually, lead them to tragic endings. The plot unfolds in a sequence of events troubling four women struggling within the limits of a racist and male-controlled social order. Their struggle is defined by their experiences that lead to individual conclusions of self-identities.
It is the moment of magical realism for each character which allows them to achieve new identities and break out of the male-controlled culture which has excluded all of them for so long. The character’s self-identity is seen as result of their struggle to break barriers and cross borders in order to exist in a culture that no longer gives priority to the masculine hierarchy of social level. Castillo actions in the novel through the instances of women’s liberation through self-identity, is illustrated by the efforts of the daughters and her own self by being independent to break the traditions of her culture that favors a male-controlled social
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Some critical attention has focused on the unresolved tension between the opposing cultural elements that influence the identities of the characters in Castillo‘s novel, and where her characters find themselves trapped in a fight to place themselves, and establish their own self-identities within a fundamentally modern moment of imperialism, and a Spanish colonial period.
Referring back to the Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, like the novel So Far from God, it also engages the model of Chicano self-identity through magic realism. Its traced back to the plot, where various identities are placed on an even playing field for Oscar, and they exist in an ongoing contest with one another. Acosta seeks variety and division; the different characters are kept in a dialogical balance as a basic unique feature of the novel and is also appropriate to the genre of his fictional

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