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Magical Realism In So Far From God

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A Realistic Depiction: A Magical Experience In So Far From God, Ana Castillo attempts to make the traditional Chicano community more accessible to the American society. Castillo delves into a small conservative town where Sofi, a mother who struggles to find her inner strength, lives with her four daughters. In her depiction, Castillo uses magical realism to blur the lines between the real and the unreal in order to enable her characters to challenge the political and religious establishments. Castillo’s powerful narrative encourages Sofi, who is portrayed as a powerless, faceless, and voiceless woman, to resist sexism. Castillo reignites Sofi’s ambitions to search for her true identity within a patriarchal society. In So Far From God, Ana Castillo empowers the powerless, depicts the faceless, and vocalizes the voiceless by using magical realism. Magical realism can be defined as a literary genre that …show more content…
Castillo’s So Far From God fulfills every criterion in the previous definition, which disputes Caminero-Santangelo’s argument. In addition, So Far From God contains the characterizations and aspects of magical realism—such as, “‘irreducible element of magic’ […] the descriptions detail a strong presence of the phenomenal world […] the narrative merges different realms […and the text invokes] ideas about time, space, and identity” (Mallory, 1-2). In addition, So Far From God has a typical narrative of magical realism in three different boundaries: the text protests political corruption, navigates between the physical and the spiritual worlds, and it empowers

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