Guest Worksheet

Title: The School Teacher's Guest              Author: Isabel Allende       Year of Publication: 1989           Genre/Sub-genre: Short story, fiction, legend, folklore

Language Style: revenge     Tone: Mocking, sarcastic, serious 

Place/Setting: Agua Santa-small town, boarding house (213), The Pearl of the Orient (213), Ramped Mango Forest (220) The school teacher's house

Social Class: Lower Middle Class, educated, Ines is a teacher, Riad is a business owner

Time Frame:Tonight (218), that afternoon (218), before sun set (218), early in the evening(218), Nine-thirty (219), Midnight (220), That night (220), the next day (220), 3-4 days, 9:30 meeting at the teacher house

Characters:

• Lieutenant
• Murderer:
• Son: gets killed at 12 years of age
• Ines: school teacher, loved by all, respected by all, rough and tough and very straightforward, Commits murder, taught a few generations in the town, loves Riad Halabi, wise, good with advice
• Riad Halabi: merchant, false turk, arab, married 2x, widow, loyal, was 65 years old

Ambiance: dreamy, mysterious, serious

Themes/Motifs: death, children, revenge, marianismo, justice, loyalty, no letting it go, keeping a secret among people

Proper Nouns: Counselor (216), judge (216), Lieutenant (216), 

Senses

• Sight: Bright flowered cloth..., Sound: insuppressible buzzing (218)
• Touch:
• Smell: "to rid the room of its odor of feces and fear" (217) His path cover with mierda
• Ears:

Symbolic Images: White handkerchief (white=Pure, clean, new)

Symbolic Elements:

• numbers:
• colors:purple (royal = power)
• two, pearl (beautiful, sought after, comes from water, recurring in multiple of her stories), ), fruit of the medlar (only edible after it has begun to decay) 
• the body left at the same place where the school teacher' son was kill.

Oddities: hour of the mosquitoes ((219) makes me think of the swarms of mosquitoes I hate during the summer at my house because of our pond, the name the author gives                 this time of day is amusing, and sounds funny, but is true, especially certain regions)

"The shutters were closed, and it was a moment before he saw on the bed the corpse of an inoffensive-looking man, a decrepit stranger swimming in the puddle of his own death, his trousers stained with excrement, his head hanging by a strip of ashen flesh, and wearing a terrible expression of distress, as if apologizing for all the disturbance and blood, and for the uncommon bother of having allowed himself to be murdered" (217) an mind blowing sentence. Quite odd and gruesome.

The whole town was "ok" with what Ines did. They simply accepted that fact that she murdered somebody.

Cultural Elements

• the treatment of death:
• the treatment of children:
• the treatment of family:
• hammocks (216):
• siestas (216):
• ceiling fans (216): in every room 
• medlar and banana trees (216), ferns (216), jungle, machete (216), coconuts (216), pineapple juice (218) cockfights (220), bull fights (220) respect
• Respect for the teachers, (marianismo)

Literary Devices: Flash back (about her son at the beginning of the story)

Intriguing Quote: 

"...tangled hill where mangoes have grown wild..."(220), 

"The death of the school teacher Ine's freed us, and now I can tell the story" ((221) Hinting at something?) 

"With the machete for harvesting coconuts. I came up behind him and lopped off his head with one swing. He never knew what hit him, poor man." (217)  Shows the character of Ines and the way she thinks. 

"He had walked onto someone's property to pick a fallen mango, and the owner, an outsider whom no one really knew, had fired a blast from his rifle meaning to scare the boy away but drilling a black hole in the middle of his forehead through which his life rapidly escaped" (214) - this quote is sad but did the guy grab the rifle too fast and pulled the trigger too quickly by picking it up? What really caused him to mistakenly do that?

"Her authority, in fact, was mightier than that of the priest, the doctor, or the police. No one stopped her from the exercise of that power.'' (127) In Latin culture, teachers are well respected. 

Foreign or Unfamiliar Terms: Medlar (216)

Dictionary Work: Medlar = noun: a small bushy tree of the rose family that bears small brown apple-like fruits