The Dew Breaker, a novel by Edwidge Danticat that tells of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s inherited dictatorship in Haiti, appears to be a novel about two things. On the one hand, it documents the life and trials of a Tonton Macoute, a government...

Many people in today's world have trouble when it comes to communicating. In literature many authors use communication as a way to either create relationships or to create barriers in one. In the novel The Dew Breaker, by Edwidge Danticat, many...

Sophie Caco, in Breath, Eyes, Memory, quotes her mother, “There’s a difference between what a person wants and what’s good for them” (72). In Edwidge Danticat’s novel, there is conflict between what Sophie wants and what her mother, Martine,...

The narrative of disempowerment is one that is woven extensively through Edwidge Danticat’s postcolonial novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory. Placing great emphasis on the politics of the domestic sphere and the stories told between women, the novel spans...

Haiti has endured a legacy of suffering whereby slavery transitioned into one of the bloodiest wars in modern history. Despite winning their political freedom to this day the Western powers impose economic strangulation and denounce their...

A Wall of Fire Rising by Edwidge Danticat depicts the emotions of guilt and regret in a financially struggling family in Haiti. The focal character of the story, Guy, suffers from this guilt and regret as the father of his family, longing for a...

"Misery won’t touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprint on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of ”(Edwidge Danticat).

These disheartening yet wise words from Edwidge Danticat articulate...

In Krik? Krak! Edwidge Danticat expands on the difficult role women must fulfill in a corrupted Haitian society. She portrays some of these requirements through the various transformations in the story, “The Missing Peace”. With this important...

The natural human response to evil is to react with evil. In many cases, the original evil is inspired by fear. This is often the case in the stories in Krik?Krak!. Two of the stories, “Nineteen thirty-seven” and “Between the Pool and the...

Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat is a collection of short stories about Haitians in various circumstances, from being miserable due to extreme poverty to being forced into exile by a dictatorship. The fictional town of Ville Rose is the location of...

The plot of most novels is said to have layers which generally fall in the structure of rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. These layers are all parts that centralize around a type of conflict, such as individual versus self or...

In October 1937, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina—one of Latin America’s most brutal dictators—directly ordered the execution of all Haitians then living in the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic. People suspected of being Haitian were asked to...