Further, the shape of a character's thought processes helps to define her or him as an individual. Inés, in "Eyes of Zapata," sees herself as a witch in the form of an owl, circling all night around her life, outside any linear perception of time; Clemencia, in "Never Marry a Mexican," seems to be almost literally living in the past as well as the present as she too "circles" in time, addressing sometimes her ex-lover and sometimes his son; the speaker in "Los Boxers" tells us less about his loneliness in what he says than in the indirect way he says it. The rejection of linear form in favor of a more relaxed discourse is especially important in characterizing Esperanza of The House on Mango Street, for it creates an ironic tension between the narrator's idiosyncratic ordering and emphases and the reader's reception of her narrative, which in turn allows the reader to learn who the character is "as a person" in much the same way we learn to "know" actual people with whose thought processes we become familiar.
If the shape and direction of discourse is one way of discovering character, another is diction, including the images and figures of speech that distinguish a person's language. It is clear that Sandra Cisneros has a gift for colorful, imaginative language, but if we look closely at her fiction, we find that she uses different kinds of image and figure (or sometimes their absence) to portray different characters. The speaker of "One Holy Night," for example, uses similes and other figures sparely, and not at all in connection with everyday matters, but those she does use are rich in images that are both arcane and mystic, suggestive of the ancient mythos into which she says Boy Baby initiated her: She wanted her virginity to "come undone like gold thread, like a tent full of birds"; her lover's words are "like broken clay, . . . hollow sticks, . . . the swish of old feathers crumbling into dust." In contrast, the tough-talking speaker of "My Tocaya" uses two figurative expressions in her story: the thought that Max Lucas Luna might suddenly appear "makes [her] blood laugh," and the "ass" of said young man is "wrapped up neat and sweet like a Hershey bar." Nothing could make plainer the difference between these two girls, the first simple but otherworldly, the second conventional and mundane.
