Like Water For Chocolate Literary Elements

According to Merriam-Webster, Magical Realism is a literary genre that incorporates fantastic or mythical elements into otherwise realistic fiction. In the novel Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, uses different forms of magical realism to catch the reader’s interest in the novel. Esquivel also uses hyperbole to exaggerate until it becomes magical. Three of the most significant magical realism parts in the novel are the rose petal dinner, the chicken fight, and Tita and Pedro’s last moment alive together. In chapter three Esquivel use magical realism by incorporating the quail in rose petal sauce with sexual tension. In the third chapter of the novel, the whole De La Garza family is eating the quail in rose petal sauce dinner; and …show more content…
For example in the novel it says, “Tita stayed flat on the ground, terrified. She couldn’t move. If she was caught in the whirlwind again, the chickens could peck her eyes out…chickens disappeared from the face of the earth, the earth swallowed them up.” (Esquivel218) Esquivel uses this as magical realism by exaggerating the characters emotions by making the chickens fight like savages, and causing it to have a big hurricane and making Tita fly away. Therefore making Tita and Rosaura like chickens, wanting to tear each other apart. Another example would be, “While Tita was singing, the bean liquor was boiling madly…Tita opened her eyes and took a bean to taste it, she saw that now the beans were done perfectly.” (Esquivel219) This is magical realism because as it explains in the novel, the beans didn’t want to cook because when people would argue the food would get mad and that is what happens to the beans. Tita singing to the beans made them happy and cooked fine; which Esquivel exaggerates because beans do not have emotions but it symbolizes the tension between both