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Dramatic Irony
Genre
Explanation and Analysis:
Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street is a fictional coming-of-age story, also known as a bildungsroman. It belongs to the specific sub-genre of Chicano literature as a novel that speaks to the Mexican American experience in particular. Cisneros, as a Mexican American woman who lived in Chicago for many years, draws on her personal experience in authoring the novel. However, The House on Mango Street is not a memoir or otherwise autobiographical: it is a work of fiction.
Each chapter in The House on Mango Street is a vignette, or a short story that highlights one aspect of the life of the protagonist, Esperanza (or occasionally a different character). These vignettes come together to make what Cisneros herself describes as a "story cycle," a collection of short stories that can be read individually but nevertheless come together to create a complete and compelling narrative. The novel then belongs to the same literary tradition as novels such as Ermilo Abreu Gómez's Canek, Elena Poniatowska's Lilus Kikus, Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha, and Nellie Campobello's My Mother's Hands, all of which Cisneros herself highlights in the introduction.
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