Beauty By Caio Abreu Analysis

Superior Essays
In “Beauty,” Caio F. Abreu deliberately chooses to repeat this particular question once at the story’s beginning and again at the story’s end: “What color was it now?” He asks the open-ended question rhetorically about the carpet to comment on its old, worn nature, regardless of whether it is actually purple or pink or some amalgam of colors in between. The repetition of the question is Abreu’s method of emphasizing the importance of color without explicitly defining its implications. The protagonist can see the color of the carpet, but he can also see the color of Beauty’s coat and the color of his mother’s hands contrasted with the color marking his own body. Although the colors manifest in different forms, contextualizing what the colors …show more content…
Nearly every named object in the house is described to possess some degree of oldness or decrepitude. His purple splotches will never be senile purpura, because at best, they are a precursor to his eventual death. He will not develop wrinkles on his skin and or grow white hair on his almost shaven head. The contradiction lies within the fact that age and decay are presented with a negative lens, as if it were an ugly, repulsive thing. On multiple occasions, his mother nonchalantly and self-deprecatingly refers to herself with phrases such as “the crazy old thing, the old witch” or “a common, decrepit old woman” (5, 8). The disparaging attitude insinuates that it is not beautiful to be old, to be worn-out; and yet time is the beautiful thing that seems to be escaping him. By his thin frame and tired demeanor, he physically appears to be aging when he is truly not. His appearance is deceiving because he is not as old as he looks, and he may never reach such an age in number. The colors of pink and purple, the indicators of AIDS on his body, have caused him to age prematurely before he even has the chance to do so on his own terms on a normal timeline. While his surroundings are consistently described in an old, decayed manner, he will never reach a comparable point despite his frail and sickly

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