Clay Worksheet

Title: “And Of Clay Are We Created”            Author: Isabel Allende

Year of Publication:  1988                          Genre/Sub-genre: Short Story

Language Style: extraordinary, dramatic, first person

Tone: heroic, introspective, surreal, dark

Place/Setting: “The towns in the valley” (320), in the mud, South America (329), National Television station

Social Class: lower class and middle class

Time Frame: Wednesday night in november (320), the first light (326), when dawn came (329), evening news (330), three days and two nights (330), first morning broadcast (328), (three full days) in the morning (320), “those first few hours” (322), “long night” (326), “second day” (327), “The third day” (329)

Characters:

• Rolf Carlé: A news reporter who can fly to the scene in a helicopter (320), confessed he is not a courageous man (321), has a big heart because he is giving it his all to safe this girl (323), he was in WWII (327), has a retarded sister named Katharina (328), gives up working for the news station (331), 
• Azucena: “dark face…large desolate eyes…plastered down tangle of hair” stuck in mud after volcano erupts (321), has brothers and sisters (322), “she was thirteen and she had never been outside the village” (323),
• Rolf’s lover: she loves Rolf (322), helps out in the newsroom (324), is very loyal to Rolf (331)

Ambiance: despair, frustration, hope, patience, uplifting, inspiring, sad

Themes/Motifs: Natural Disasters, compassion, frustration, struggle, fear, devastation, consolation, memories, overcoming the past, love, acceptance, courage, challenges, persistence, despair, death, heroes, and tragedy, hope, self discovery, separtion, isolation

Proper Nouns: First Communion, Lily, Wednesday, November (320), North American, National Petroleum (324), Civil Defense (325), Austrian, Russians, Europe (327), President of the Republic, Armed Forces, Army (329), South America (329)

Senses:

• Olfactory (smell): “odor of death was already attracting vulture from far away” (319), “one could begin to smell the stench of corpses” (321), “Katharina’s scent melded with his own swear, with aromas of cooking, garlic, soup, freshly baked bread, and the unexpected odor of putrescent clay” (328), The air around him seemed as murky (321) 
• auditory: “the cord tensed, the girl screamed” (322),
• tactile: “the warm liquid revived her” (323), “her silk hair against her check” (328)
• "pronounced longed roar (sound); announced the end of the world...and walls of snow broke loose (sight and sound), rolling and avalanche of clay, stones  and water...(320)

Symbolic Images:

• “the little girl obstinately clinging of life became the symbol of the tragedy” (319),
• “The screen reduced the disaster to a single plane an accentuated the tremendous distance that separated me form Rolf Carlé, nonetheless, I was there with him.” (324),
• “Katharina materialized before him, floating on the air like a flag” (328),
• “he saw his mother, dressed in black and clutching her imitation-crocodile pocketbook to her bosom” (329),
• “a pale light filtering though storm clouds” (329)
• "pronounced longed roar, announced the end of the world...and walls of snow broke loose, rolling an avalanche of clay, stones, and water..." (320)

Symbolic Elements:

• “The screen reduced the disaster to a single plane an accentuated the tremendous distance that separated me form Rolf Carlé, nonetheless, I was there with him.” (324),
• “and I had a horrible sensation that Azucena and Rolf were by my side, separated from be by impenetrable glass” (326),
• “he was Azucena, he was buried in the clayey mud” (328)
• Lily: rebirth, hope white
• vultures: death and decay, scavangers of the dead
• valcano: power and fury of nature. In some mythology believed to be the power of the gods
• green (320)
• Mud and clay: from the earth, taken back in, endless cycle

Oddities: “I could reach him by force of mind and in that way give him encouragement. I concentrated until I was dizzy a frenzied and futile activity.” (324)  "Many more hours would go by before he accepted that time had staganted and reality had been irreparably ditorted" (323)

Cultural Elements: Volcanos, white cotton plantations, dark coffee forests, cattle pastures (320), “bureaucratic obstacles” (325), “hanging a medal of the Virgin around her neck” (326), “anyone caught stealing or committing other offenses would be shot on sight” (329), “her courage had served as an example to the nation” (329)

Literary Devices:

• Hyperbole: “eternal ice” (319),
• Simile: “they sounded like the tales of frightened old women” (320), “the air around him seemed as murky as the mud” (321), “as if an ancestral resignation allowed her to accept her fate” (322), “like a life buoy” (322), “as if I were staring through a telescope at the light of a star dead for a million years.” (325), “the naked bodies piled like a mountain of firewood resemble fragile china?” (327), “trembling, huddled like a cornered animal” (328),
• personification: “fear seemed never to touch him” (321), “the lens of the camera had a strange effect on him” (321), “sorrow flooded through him” (328),
• metaphor: “that held the girl in her tomb” (326), “the sky is weeping” (326), “trapped in a pit without escape, buried in life” (327), “with the never-forgotten hiss of a viper coiled to strike” (328), “she sank slowly, a flower in the mud” (331),
• flashbacks: his memories of war and his mother, “seen his mother naked, shod in stiletto-heeled red boot, sobbing with humiliation”, “he saw before his eyes the boots and legs of his father, who had removed his belt and was whipping it” (327)

Intriguing Quote:

• “that she was also held by the bodies of her brothers and sisters clinging to her legs.” (322),
• “How, finally, they were able to accept death. Rolf Carlé prayed in silence that she would die quickly, because such pain cannot be borne” (330),
• “Beside you, I wait for you to complete the voyage into yourself, for the old wounds to heal” (321)
• " ...every tug was an intolorable torture for the girl" (322)
• "For some time they had predicted that the heat of the eruption could detatch the eternal ice from the slopes of the volcano... they sounded like the tales of the frightened old woman." (319) - I found this quote a bit intriguing because it referred the Geologist of the tale of an freightened old woman, when in The U.S. we just say someone is acting like the boy who cried wolf. Another thing about this quote is that it says the mountains ice is "eternal" but yet they are expecting the heat from a volcano eruption to detatch it.
• The last sentence of the first paragrap foreshadows the ending: "Rolf Carle' ... never suspect(ed) that the would find a fragment of his past, lost thirty years before." 

Foreign or Unfamiliar Terms:

equanimity (321) -  “mental or emotional stability or composure, especially under tension or strain; calmness; equilibrium.”

Subterranean (319) - "existing, occuring, or done underneath the earth's surface"