Sandra Cisneros Essays (Examples)

Sandra Cisneros's "Eyes Zapata," Zakaria Tamer's "Sheep," Nawal al-Saadawi's "In Camera," Hanan

The predominant similarity between Sandra Cisneros's short story, "Eyes of Zapata," and Nawal al-Saadawi's "In Camera," is that both narratives deal with the oppression of women who fail to conform to the limited roles that society constructs for their gender. Such oppression takes many forms in each of these tales. In Cisneros' story, the protagonist is ravaged by both the effects of war and the repercussions it produces for her husband, a military leader. In al-Saadawi's narrative, the protagonist is both physically and intellectually persecuted in very overt, gruesome methods. An examination of both of these works reveals the fact that due to the nature of the oppression the lead character endures in Cisneros' writing, this tale is unequivocally a love story, whereas the nature of the oppression endured by the protagonist in al-Saadawi's story reveals that it…

Chicano

Sandra Cisneros and the Cultural Construction of Latin-American omanhood

Sandra Cisneros stands as one of the most formative Chicana writers of her generation. She has inspired many other Chicano novelists, poets, and essayists because of the critical and popular success of her first novel, The House on Mango Street. However, despite the book's attempt to give validity to a more positive view of Latin American culture, as it exists in the United States, Cisneros' novel and her subsequent works have not stinted in their criticism of certain aspects of Hispanic life and reality, such as the inequality between the sexes.

Cisneros is an author, and he first novel attempted to give a certain beauty and dramatic weight to the innocent perspective of a young, Latina girl. The work 'argued' that young Latina life was interesting and a culturally significant topic for modern fiction. However, Cisneros is also quite critical…

Looking at her mother she concludes that education is a supportive element for personal freedom and also happiness. ironically, her mother is another woman trapped in her house. Esperanza will finally comprehend that she is free to do what she wants to do.

A very unpleasant episode of sexual abuse and two deaths in her family are shocking episodes which push her closer to maturity. Their negative emotional impact make her desire to leave Mango Street even greater. As she develops emotionally she understand that her way out is represented by writing. She is talented and she might make something in this direction. At the end of the book the character understands the meaning of the witch's words. She realizes that sooner or later she will be strong enough to leave Mango Street, but the place is already a piece of her heart, an important part in her identity, of…

Thus, Clemencia stood for everything the American's wife is not, and that included being a Latino. It became evident in the story, however, that despite her insistence that she was influencing and reinforcing her identity to her lover, she did not realize that she is rapidly becoming part of the culture she tried to avoid in her home. Her cruel and insensitivity as a married man's lover opposed the moral values and beliefs that Clemencia's Latino culture considered essential and foundation of Latino identity. In her attempt to become a truly authentic, 'untainted' Latino, she was actually being acculturated gradually by her lover to the American culture as she becomes centered on the idea that she was actually influencing him when in fact, her lover changed her to become more modern and American, neglecting her values, thereby neglecting her true Latino identity.

House Mango Street Sandra Cisnero"(book) the question paper: Is book represe

It would be exceedingly difficult to represent all of Latino culture in any book, regardless of how talented the author is. Nonetheless, Sandra Cisneros is that rare breed of author for whom, particularly as it relates to her unique blend of poetry and prose, virtually nothing is impossible. She has been hailed as "a major literary talent" (Cruz, 2010, p. 56). One of her most revered works, The House on Mango Street, details her life and those around her who grew up in the continental United States. Virtually all of the characters (and the vast majority of people that the characters interact with, for that matter) are Latino. Still, the Latino culture is, if nothing else, extremely diverse and as variegated a group of people as one can find on the earth itself. This fact takes on a particular…

Sandra Cisneros's short story "Woman Hollering Creek," and "Still I ise," a poem by Maya Angelou both make statements about race, power, and gender in America.

Cisneros is a Chicano author and Maya Angelou is an African-American author and poet.

Brief Text Summaries: "Woman Hollering Creek" touches on issues like domestic violence and the subjugation of women. "Still I ise" celebrates black female identity in a culture that is both racist and sexist.

Although different in both form and intent, Cisneros's "Woman Hollering Creek" and Angelou's "Still I ise" both reveal the intersections between race, power, and gender in American society.

Topic Sentence 1: The intersection between gender, race, and power is one of the most salient themes in both Cisneros and Angelou, as both write from the perspective of minority females.

Focus on Cisneros

Example 1: " ... there isn't very much to do except ... to watch the…

However, there is also danger to the sexuality that lies behind sweetness, as when a girl Sally, marries a marshmallow salesman to escape an abusive father, entering a union that seems as bad as the home she is leaving.

A final symbol of the novel is that of play -- few adult women, except for the insane Ruthie, are seen enjoying themselves over the course of the novel. Girls can play at jump rope and look at clouds, but they worry about how the burdens and cares of an adult life -- like abusive or absent husbands, children, and money worries -- will weigh them down, as their bodies mature. Men are shown playing and gambling, but women must put their own pleasures aside for fathers, husbands, and brothers. Early on in the novel, Esperanza comments how even in her family the boys and the girls tend to separate as…

structure and content of the outline met the objectives of the assignment. I narrowed down the topic further to differentiate between Angelou and Cisneros because I recognized that Angelou sends her readers an optimistic message of self-empowerment, while Cisneros opts to use the medium of traditional storytelling more as a warning to women about how patriarchy strangles their power and self-reliance. Essentially, both send the same message using different media and different tones.

ace and gender are features that often determine access to power in a society. Moreover, race and gender are critical to personal identity formation, just as they locate an individual in the stratifications of the society.

Sandra Cisneros's short story "Woman Hollering Creek," and "Still I ise," a poem by Maya Angelou both make statements about race, power, and gender in America.

Author Backgrounds: Cisneros is a Chicano author and Maya Angelou is an African-American author and…

And it is the tragedy of not knowing that Marin imagines in the story's last paragraph, when she envisions the family he left behind in Mexico as they "wonder, shrug, remember" the pretty boy who vanished and was "never heard from…again."

Cisneros arranges "Geraldo No Last Name" around two basic structural facts. One is the filtering of the story through Marin's consciousness, so that the subject of the story is not really Geraldo's brief life and death -- it is about what somebody like Marin thinks about when she contemplate somebody like Geraldo. And the second fact is, of course, the emphasis given to the different elements of what Marin considers: in some sense, the sad fact of Geraldo's death is subsidiary to the sad facts of his actual life as an illegal worker in a foreign country, who will die without ever seeing his family again. The fact that…

Chesla, pp. 1). Even though Hispanics have had to adapt to the American landscape if they wanted to thrive in the U.S., Hispanic communities have done a great job at keeping their customs and traditions.

One can actually say that Cisneros put a lot of her real life experiences into the character of Esperanza. The author has always felt that the men around her have attempted to impose themselves, pressing her to assume a typical female role. This is seen in "The Family of Little Feet" in several instances. Mr. Benny threatens the girls that he'll call the police if they don't leave. Also, he says that it is dangerous for them to be walking around with high-heeled shoes. It is obvious that Cisneros had had trouble developing in a community where women were not necessarily considered equal to men. Certain men have even went as far as comparing women…

Marry a Mexican, " highlighting underlining things essay. e talked patterns follow class: animal images, food images, religious images, discussion race color.

Point: The narrator Clemencia has been scarred by her previous relationships with men and the image of men given to her by her mother.

Evidence: Clemencia says: "I'll never marry…Mexican men, forget it…For a long time the men clearing off the tables or chopping meat behind the butcher counter or driving the bus I road to school today, those weren't men. Not men I considered potential lovers. ..I never saw them…my mother did this to me" (Cisneros 69).

Explanation: Clemencia's feelings about Mexican men, although she is Mexican herself, have their roots in both class-based and personal prejudice -- American society relegates Mexicans to largely subservient positions but she has also witnessed the gender-based prejudices within Mexican culture directed at her mother.

Point: There are invisible class differences…

The novel opens seven years after Gabo's mother, Ximena, was murdered by coyotes -- or paid traffickers -- during an attempt to cross the border. Her mutilated body was found, her organs gone -- sold most likely. Because of the fear surrounding this border town and the lure of the other side, all of the characters become consumed with finding afa. These people are neglected and abused. Like other fiction works on this topic (such as Cisneros's The House on Mango Street), The Guardians (2008) is rich in symbolism and flavored with Mexican aphorisms. The novel also shows the reader how complex and perilous border life is when you're living in between the United States and Mexico.

The book is important when attempting to understand the challenge of the border town life and it is, at the same time, a testament to faith, family bonds, cultural pride, and the human…

Fiction's Come a Long Way, aby

The development of fiction from its nascent stages until today's contemporary works is a storied one. Many features mark contemporary fiction and differentiate it from the classics of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries: For one, modern writers use different perspectives to narrate: In some works, the narrator switches from third-person omniscient to first person, and in some contemporary works, even the challenging second-person. Experimentation in styles also marks contemporary fiction: Nabokov, perhaps fiction's greatest ever stylist, has written one novel penned to ladies and gentlemen of the jury, and another as literary criticism on a purposefully mediocre poem. (Nabokov: Lolita and Pale Fire).

ut one of the most pronounced shifts in fiction over these centuries has been the move from stuffy, high art to a fixation on and immersion in pop culture. George Eliot, for instance, in "Daniel Deronda," interspersed a very staid…

Zapata

Chicana Identity in "Eyes of Zapata"

In her 1991 collection of stories entitled oman Hollering Creek and Other Short Stories, Sandra Cisneros offers some compelling insights into the cultural lives, personal experiences and romantic endeavors of an unrelated selection of Mexican-Americans. Cisneros' compilation of narratives are unrelated in plot but linked together by common themes, specifically themes concerning the female experience in this cultural context. The story entitled "Eyes of Zapata" is especially engaging on this subject, depicting the trials faced by Ines as she attempts to reconcile her love for a man with this man's responsibility to his revolutionary cause. In doing so, this story that revolves around the actions of a Mexican cultural hero paints a portrait of woman whose sacrifices made her no less heroic.

The relationship between Ines and Zapata is perhaps only secondary in this story to the relationship between Ines and herself. A…

Esperanza transforms into a girl who wants nothing else but to leave the house on Mango Street and all the neighbors behind into a woman with a real sense of responsibility to the people in her neighborhood. She goes from thinking only of herself to really considering the lives of those in her community. This sense of responsibility and her set of values show that Esperanza has transcended even herself.

Esperanza's most important transformation is, arguably, her transformation into a real writer. In the beginning of the story, Esperanza can only imagine stories in which she is one of the characters; however, by the end of the story, Esperanza is able to imagine stories that don't involve her -- and this denotes that she is becoming a real writer and a true artist. It is ironic that through her writing she is able to detach herself from her neighborhood while,…

B.

Human development and evolution across all cultures mean that there will be a gap between older generations, who tend to cling to outdated ideals and paradigms, and younger generations, who tend away from the traditional and towards new developments. While there are merits in both positions, subscribers to each respective position seldom see the value in the viewpoint of the other. Hence, the conflicts that arise are often difficult to manage and impossible to overcome.

Such conflict is clearly portrayed in Nash Candelaria's "El Patron," and also to a degree in Oscar Hijuelos's "Visitors, 1965. n the former, the traditional viewpoint is represented by Lola's father, Senor Martinez, while the more progressive viewpoint is represented by the other three major characters in the story; Lola, her brother Tito, and her husband, the narrator of the story. The difference in viewpoints can be seen on a variety of platforms, including…

Gertrude Stein, The Gentle Lena

The most obvious thing about this story was that nothing really happened. At the start, continually reading about the "patient, gentle, sweet and german" Lena and her "peaceful life" I was expecting there to be some twist to the story, perhaps with Lena snapping and becoming something other than patient, gentle and sweet. However, this twist did not come, which is probably what makes the story work so well. It is a simple and sad story about a life lived without consequence. Having Lena resolve the situation in some way, would not be true to the story, since any action would mean Lena's life did have some meaning.

Overall, it is a story of a woman accepting her life without questioning it. Lena does not appear either content or happy, instead it is more like she is numb. This is emphasized by the fact that…

Ignorance Bliss? A Comparison and Contrast of the Characters and Themes of Sandra Cisneros' "The House on Mango Street" and "Araby" by James Joyce

Plot Summary

Character Summary

Ignorance, although comfortable is not bliss at all.

Character

Gender

Age Difference

Culture

Catholicism and sexuality in Joyce

Catholicism and family in Cisneros

Home

Significance of home in Cisneros

Significance of leaving home in Joyce

Both the protagonists of Sandra Cisneros and "Araby" by James Joyce are young adolescents, poised upon the brink of realizing that older people do not have all of the answer in life. The tales detail the coming of age of the young protagonists, as they realize that the adults in their respective worlds are not as good or wise as they seem to be. Cisneros's female heroine comes to her realization when she is contrasting the promises of her family about the house on Mango Street her…

oman Hollering Creek

The real-life oman Hollering Creek is a small waterway located in Central Texas. It is supposed that the name is a loose translation of the Spanish La Llorana or "weeping woman." This is a folktale of the area wherein a woman drowns her children in order to be with the man that she loves and yet he rejects her. Distraught over all she has lost, the woman (most ofthen called Maria) kills herself. At the gates, the woman is not allowed to go through them because she is without her children. Unable to enter Heaven, the weeping woman is forced to haunt the living world, searching everywhere for her children, for she will not be allowed access to Heaven until she locates them. Sandra Cisneros short story "oman Hollering Creek" is based upon this ancient legend. The story is about a young woman named Cle-filas. She is…

The frequency of window imagery in the novel highlights both the importance of expectancy ("Esperanza) and houses. Esperanza's namesake was said to always be looking out of a window, after she was 'carried off' by a man, symbolizing Esperanza's fears of maturity. Esperanza is ashamed when people point to her house through windows, like the nun at her school points at the house from a window to indicate why Esperanza cannot eat her rice sandwich with the 'special students' who do not live nearby. The first chapter of the novel chronicles all of the many problems with the house she lives in, from the crumbling steps to the leaky plumbing, and worst of all the fact that it, just like all of the houses Esperanza has lived in her life, is leased.

A window is something both 'of' a house, but also allows an individual to look away and beyond…

House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros [...] theme of search for self-definition. The protagonist of this novel, Esperanza, narrates a series of "chapters" concerning her life, her world, and the barrio as she sees it happening around her. Throughout the book, as Esperanza watches the world, she struggles to discover just who she is, and where she fits in the world around her. This self-definition is a compelling theme of the novel, but it also shows the difficulties many young Latinas face as they come of age in America.

Published in 1984, many critics believe "The House on Mango Street" is one of the best Chicana stories written. Author Sandra Cisneros writes with knowledge and pathos of growing up Latina in America because she herself experienced the difficulties of growing up in multi-cultural family. Her mother is Mexican-American and her father is Mexican, and she spent her childhood "commuting"…

Spanglish is a combination of Spanish and English, with each of these two languages having more or less of an influence on the final product depending on the circumstances. The speech of Spanghlish users involves them bringing together the two languages and creating a dialect that is not native to the country they inhabit. Spanglish is widely used in Hispanic communities in North America, as they prefer it as an intermediary dialect assisting them to connect with the English-speaking community.

Living in two cultures can have a strong impact on a person, as he or she gradually comes to switch back and forth between cultural values promoted in each of these respective environments. This is perfectly demonstrated by individuals speaking Spanglish, taking into account that they need to concentrate on adopting attitudes that enable them to improve their relationship to both English and Spanish-speaking communities.

Although Spanish plays an integral…

Down These Mean Streets believe that every child is born a poet, and every poet is a child. Poetry to me was always a very sacred form of expression. (qtd. In Fisher 2003)

Introduction / Background History

Born Juan Pedro Tomas, of Puerto Rican and Cuban parents in New York City's Spanish Harlem in 1928, Piri Thomas began his struggle for survival, identity, and recognition at an early age. The vicious street environment of poverty, racism, and street crime took its toll and he served seven years of nightmarish incarceration at hard labor. But, with the knowledge that he had not been born a criminal, he rose above his violent background of drugs and gang warfare, and he vowed to use his street and prison know-how to reach hard-core youth and turn them away from a life of crime.

Thirty years ago Piri Thomas made literary history with this lacerating,…

Treatment of omen in Mexican Culture

The choices for women have, across both time and space, almost always been far more constrained than the choices of men. They have in fact all too often been reduced to a single pair of opposing choices: The pure or the corrupt, the white or the black, the chaste or the sexual - the virgin or the whore.

Mexican culture is certainly not exempt from this tendency to place women on one side of this dichotomy or the other, but in the case of Mexican images of women this division of the female half of the population into the chaste, good woman and the terrible promiscuous one becomes complicated by issues of race (and racial purity), by the historical condition of colonization and post-colonization, by the partial displacement, partial incorporation of native belief systems by Catholicism.

These many complications and elaborations of this essential…

Anarchy in the Tenth rade": A Retrospective Analysis of an Adolescent's Search for self

So much of an individual's later life is contingent upon his or her search for a coherent sense of self, as achieved in childhood and adolescence. The personal essay entitled "Anarchy in the 10th rade" by punk music legend reg raffin, as well as short stories such as Ernest Hemingway's "Indian Camp," and Sandra Cisneros' "Hips" all detail the phenomena of coming of age in young adolescence. The authors show how internal and external struggles to achieve a sense of identity, although common and even necessary to people of this age group, can be intensely painful. In his short story, Hemingway shows a young boy physically developing a sense of his manhood, in after seeing his father help an Indian woman give birth. Cisneros' narrator debates the intricacies of the female form from a female perspective,…

She feels she doesn't really belong to that house because that is not the house of her dreams. That is what prompts her to start writing. Her creative pursuits help her stay sane so she doesn't feel so trapped by the "ghost" of the sad red house. "I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much. I write it down and Mango says goodbye sometimes. She does not hold me with both arms. She sets me free" (p. 101).

It is highly interesting that house in this novel doesn't only represent the physical house but also the imaginary dwelling in the mind that Esperanza escapes to in order to alleviate the anguish. The house is thus a place of escape for her. When the reality becomes too unbearable, Esperanza seeks another dwelling. This dwelling exists in her mind and produced by her creative skills.…

house is the symbol in the House of Mango Street.

The title of the novel A House on mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, is both straightforward and deceptive. The name of the street suggests a quiet street in a nice neighborhood, a street lined with trees in a lazy afternoon. As soon as the first chapter begins, the reader will find out that the street and therefore the house in question are anything but. Houses do indeed symbolize in the novel stability, anchors in childhood memories, family life, and shelter.

The narrator introduces a grim series of houses she has spent her childhood in, culminating with the house that will give the title of the novel. Houses are for the adult remembering childhood memories a symbol of a life style, reminders of a harsh or sometimes, happy reality. A house stands there for the one remembering the days she spent…

273).

And Vela-Gude's article offers several of the main points of this paper's research; the services must be ready, and the counselors must be thoroughly informed and knowledgeable about the cultural implications as well as the academic realities facing those Latino students (2009).

Racism Against Latinos

This paper alludes to the high number of Latinos in California and Texas, but according to the Southern Poverty Law Center's research, the South is home to one of the "fastest growing populations of Latinos in the country" (Bauer, et al., 2009, p. 4). But though the typical Latino immigrant comes to the South to escape "crushing poverty in their home countries" they often encounter "…widespread hostility, discrimination and exploitation" (Bauer, 2009, p. 4).

hat kinds of discrimination do Latinos come up against in the South? Mary Bauer and her chief researcher, Sarah Reynolds, claim that Latinos are "…routinely cheated out of their earnings…

Female Sexuality and Self Development in Chicana Culture

Eysturoy (1996) points out that studies of women's sexuality related to Chicana culture have focused on the quest "for authentic female self development." She notes that this process involves environment and psychological factors combined, and involves "coming to terms with multiple social and cultural forces" in addition to coming to terms with internal and external issues that often impede Chicana women from realizing "individuation" or understanding their sense of individual self (77).

The author notes that a recurrent theme in much of Chicana literature centers on the evolvement of a child into an older women, and that in fact a majority of the literature related to Chicana women focus on the process of self development that is not just a search for identity, but rather a method for engaging Chicana readers and exploring or articulating a process that will ultimately lead to…

Magical Realism in Ana Castillo's 'So Far From God'

hen looking for the magical realism in Ana Castillo's So Far From God, and for those readers who know her work and her cultural background, one of the ways in which the author employs magical realism is as a skilled fiction writer. Castillo is writing about Latinos, a family of women. Her first step in employing magical realism is to set aside the Latino patriarchal cultural restrictions that would otherwise prevent the concept of "magical realism" from working in the story. Castillo had to find a way to overcome that allowed the reality to be used to advance the story past that obstacle. She also had the obstacle of Latino Catholicism, which is as equal a force with which to be confronted as is the patriarchal society. This essay is an examination of how Ana Castillo overcomes these obstacles in her…

Hispanic vs. Latino

In these times of political correctness and cultural awareness and sensitivity, it is very important to know the right term when discussing a people or their culture. It is very easy to offend without intending to so or to cause emotional pain through ignorance. This is why it has become increasingly important to know the right cultural term for a given population. People with Mexican heritage have interchangeably been referred to by the terms Hispanic or Latino for many years. Lately, it has become necessary to create a single identifying term so that the group feels unified and no one feels at all slighted by a term they deem to be in any way offensive to themselves or their culture. Many cultural critics have argued that the term Hispanic is more offensive that Latino because it the term was created by the government and Latino was the…

I think about that when I look in the mirror, and see my dark hair, olive skin, and wistful smile. My father gave me my name, and that is just another reason I am so proud to carry it. it's an old-fashioned name, to be sure, but that suits me, I think. I don't have old-fashioned values in some areas, but in others, I'm very much the traditional girl. I may be a single mother, but like parents of all ages, I want more for my son, and I want him to appreciate who he is and who he comes from. Sometimes I think that my father named me perfectly, because my name is special, and he wanted me to feel special, too. I do, and not because so many people don't understand my name. I feel special because my father gave me a gift of a wonderful name, that…

Maya Angelou is one of the most renowned and influential voices in the recent time. She is a celebrated poet, novelist, actor and filmmaker. In her early life, she experienced the brutality of racial discrimination based on the situation at the time (Goodman 21). Her experiences in life had an influence in her work as she touched on the issues of racism and sexism over the years. Her poems, in particular, have prioritized on the themes of racism and sexism to reveal some of the issues that affect the society today. This paper looks at the manifestation of the theme of racism in Maya Angelou's poems.

It emerges from her poems that despite being her being a good writer, she was discriminated against and was not given the credit she deserves all because she was black. In her poem, 'Still I Rise', she declares:

You may write me down in…

She is literally locked in the house and it becomes her "protector" of sorts. It is as real as a character because it is has a type of power over Louise. She can never leave it. After hearing the news of Brently, Louise runs up to her room and "would have no one follow her" (635). The room takes on a persona as it becomes the one thing with which Louise shares her secret of freedom. Here, she can relish in the thought of being free without worrying about the disapproval of others. Here, she can express the excitement she feels when she looks outside and considers freedom as something within her grasp. This is the only place that knows her true heart and it is the only place in which she has few minutes to taste the freedom she desires. The room envelops her and allows her to this…

"

Thus, although she is not aware as such of her position in society, she realizes however that the house they moved to does not correspond to what her family had been dreaming about. The small and crammed house offers almost as little space as the other places they lived in. When describing the small house, the author introduces the single metaphor in the speech of the child narrator, saying that the windows were so small that one would think "they're holding their breath":

But the house on Mango Street it's not the way they told it at all. it's small and red with tight steps in front and windows so small you'd think they were holding their breath."

The metaphor is very significant as it highlights the main theme of the story: the interplay between the personal space and the space of the others, or the relation between the…

Pat Mora -- "Curandera" and "Immigrants" -- are quite different and yet they both express the what it's like to be Latina and they detail experiences that are unique to Latinas in America.

"Curandera": A curandera is a woman of Latina ethnicity who practices folk medicine. In the poem, the curandera has bonded and her life has progressed with and is dependent upon nature -- the desert -- even though she lost her husband. Her craft is about healing, and the relationship to nature is powerfully presented around the theme of healing with folk medicine.

"Her days are slow, days of grinding dried snake into power, of crushing wild bees to mix with white wine." This could be suggesting monotony because she does the same thing every day, grinding and crushing, using the available resources of nature to help people heal. But the coyote and owl, too, do the same…

Paradoxically, based on the outcome of the story, it can be argued that the snake in the crest is not poisonous or else Fortunato's "bite" would have had more severe consequences on Montressor; however, the story ends with Montressor getting away in Fortunato's murder.

Symbolic foreshadowing can also be seen in the conversation about masons between Montressor and Fortunato. As Fortunato questions Montressor about being a mason, Montressor assures his victim that he is and pulls out a trowel "from beneath the folds of [his] roquelaire" (277). Ironically, Fortunato is asking if Montressor is a Freemason and not a mason by trade. Furthermore, Montressor's assertion that he is a mason also hints at how he will carry out his revenge.

Lastly, symbolism and irony are evident in the characters' names. Montressor's name can be loosely translated into my treasure, which can refer to the type of slight that was committed…