The following excerpt is from Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat (published in 2013). In this passage, seven-year-old Claire has discovered that her father, a poor Haitian fisherman, has decided to place her with a local shopkeeper, Madame Gaëlle, so that he can look for more lucrative work. In response to this revelation, Claire has decided to run away from home. Read the passage carefully. Write a paragraph in which you make a defensible claim regarding how Danticat uses literary elements and techniques to convey setting. In your paragraph, you should incorporate at least one piece of evidence from the text to support your claim.

Danticat’s stories and books have reserved her many awards and nominations, including the American Book Award for her novel The Farming of Bones, Krik? Krak! and her nonfiction book, Brother, I’m Dying. She has a unique literary style, which makes her stories distinguishable. The way she uses the techniques to convey the setting is quite remarkable. Krik? Krak! is a short, realistic, and historical fiction of coming of age. The stories of Krik? Krak! is set in New York City, an island nation in the Caribbean. The story has been written in the context of the totalitarian regimes of the Duvaliers.

She has used the term foreshadowing to illustrate the story. Like when the female letter writer thanks her father for saving her life. He rapidly moves a hand, which resembles a black butterfly. Black butterflies symbolize death, and this one foreshadows the male letter writer’s passing. The writer also has used allusion like there are plenty of religious allusions to Voudou and Christianity.

The letter writer in “Children of the Sea” has a very distinct style. The male letter writer has perfect grammar and writes in a formal, gentile style. The female letter writer cares less about grammatical correctness. That is how the paradox is used to depict the story.