An Elephant Vanishes
“ Explain the role of the kitchen in “Like Water For Chocolate” by Laura Esquivel and “The Elephant Vanishes” by Murakami.
In Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, food and the kitchen is a means of expressing a range of human emotions.
Like Water for Chocolate opens with its most important central setting, the kitchen. Onion-induced weeping quite literally sweeps the protagonist, Tita, into the world, as she is born in the kitchen, crying, amidst of flood of her mother's tears. Her mother, Mama Elena, is unable to produce milk (due to shock at the recent death of her husband) and Mama Elena gives Tita almost immediately to the house cook, Nacha, who rears the child in the kitchen. Surrounded by the colours, smells, and routines of Nacha's kitchen, Tita grows up understanding the world in terms of food. She enjoys her isolation in the domain of the kitchen.
“Thanks to her unusual birth, Tita felt a deep love for the kitchen where she spent most of her life from the day she was born” page 10, paragraph two.
The story of Tita's entry into the world marks the first fantastical image of Like Water for Chocolate, initiating the reader into the novel's magical realism and illustrating the intensity and improbability that characterise the events of the story. The image of Tita flowing into the world in a flood of tears prefigures the sadness and longing that will pervade her life. After Tita's birth, the flood of tears dries to leave ten pounds of salt to be collected and used for cooking. The practical attitude with which the characters greet this surreal happening helps to establish the supernatural as an accepted part of the characters' lives.
“Nacha swept aside the residue the tears had left on the red stone floor, There was enough salt to fill a ten-pound-sack- it was used for cooking and lasted a long time”
page 10, paragraph two.
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