Of Clay Are We Created Analysis

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In Of Clay Are We Created by Isabel Allende we are introduced to the protagonist of the story, Rolf Carle, a renowned Australian newscaster, who sets off to cover a volcano eruption. Carle was there on an assignment, just another job, but ended making some discoveries about himself and managing to accept and move on from his traumatic past. All because of a young girl in the most tragic of situations.
Carle used his camera as a way to distance himself from reality. It masked his fear and gave him courage in the face of people suffering and putting himself in dangerous situations. The camera gave him a distance from real life, and more importantly his own emotions. His traumatic past led him to needing a separation from reality, and a camera was just that.
When Carle met Azucena, buried deep in clay from the disastrous volcano eruption, he tried his hardest to rescue her from her prison. But eventually realized that as much as he did, he wasn’t helping her, instead he was hurting her, as with every tug to attempt to get her body out of the clay, she yelled in pain, stuck from “her brothers and …show more content…
Carle’s damaging childhood had made him into a hard, emotionless man who hid behind his job and multiple flings to ignore the mess that was inside his head. Watching Azucena stuck in the clay, with no way out, brought back memories of his childhood. His abusive father who would lock him in a closet for hours for “imagined missbehaviour” or hiding underneath the dining room table with his sister, a “retarded child”. All of the stuff that he had locked away in the back of his mind, the repressive memories of a traumatic childhood came flooding back to him. Carle had long forgotten the camera, and as he let go of his coping mechanism the walls that surround him came crashing down, allowing him to finally be in touch with his emotions. All the sadness and fear that he buried in his head many years ago, when he was a child, came to the