Like Chayo's figures, but more playful and less grown-up, are those we find on practically every page of The House on Mango Street. Esperanza talks of cats "asleep like donuts," a big, clumsy dog "like a man dressed in a dog suit," hips on a maturing girl "ready and waiting like a new Buick with the keys in the ignition," two little black dogs "that leap and somersault like an apostrophe and comma." Her figures are more frequent and colorful when she is happy, fewer and farther between when she is not. And, appropriately, Esperanza's figures of speech, even when they are so wildly far-fetched as to be almost conceits (a Cadillac's smashed "nose" is "pleated like an alligator's"), are almost always similes, the simplest, least "mature," form of metaphor.
Thus form, in Cisneros' fiction, seems to exist primarily not for its own sake, nor to further any theoretical or political program, but for the very respectable purpose of advancing the sketches and portraits of that fiction's characters. Both in the non-linear shapes of the pieces and in the language of the characters themselves, form is here a means to the end of making these human sketches and portraits come to life.
