Deconstruction is a poststructural approach to literary analysis which I s beet considered a strategic device for interpretation a text. Deconstructists wish to deconstruct the idea that truth or a core of metaphysical ideals can be believed, articulated, and supported. The student essay by Jennifer Douglas on "The House on Mango Street" uses transcendental signifier, logocentrism, and binary oppositions as well as alternates the privileged and the unprivileged. Douglas, though, does not apply supplementation and misspeaks. .
Applying transcendental signifier, Douglas shows that one thing would provide ultimate meaning. She uses a transcendental signifier by stating that "the narrator alternates between privileging reality and dream by first acknowledging the positive aspects of the house on Mango Street and then complaining that her new conditions do not conform to her hopes." "Sandra Cisneros depicts a child's reaction to the living conditions she endures as her family struggles against poetry." Even at the beginning of her essay, Douglas applies logocentrism by believing that there is an ultimate reality that and serve as the basis is for all [her] thoughts and actions. She says that the story privileges renting over ownership and reality over ream. This is an example of binary opposition. Binary opposition represents the theoretical oppositions on which Jacques Derrida believes Western metaphysics is based on. Upon the first reading of the short story, readers would believe that the story privileges dream over reality and ownership over renting. As a binary opposition reader, Douglas states, "renting received privilege" and the flat on Loomis is "preferable." She continues to say that even the house on Mango Street would make the "narrator's blunt declaration of ownership would be considered selfish, materialistic, and socially unacceptable." .