I believe the best story we read this semester was "Deliverance from Evil". Ana Lydia Vega does an incredible job portraying the characters ideas through narrative technique. Vega wrote this short story based on five different narrators. The five narrators include: Madame, Elena, Violeta, Violeta's husband, and a 3rd person narrator. It is this type of clever narration that kept me reading with interest until the very end. To give you an idea of how effective Vega's technique is I will lightly detail each of her narrators.
Vega breaks the story up into eight sections, each having a unique narrator. We start off with a 3rd person narration. Having a 3rd person narrator in the first section as well as the fifth and seventh sections allows for some background and insight. The narrator is able to set up the scene and introduce the characters.
In the second and sixth sections Madame is the narrator and describes a scene with Violeta. Madame talks about how she believes in the spirit that " had been sitting on the foot of her bed and she wanted to know who it was." (55) Espiritismo is having contact with spirits and in this scene you can clearly see this as Madame describes how she " breaks out in goose bumps and my bones start shaking." (55).
In the 3rd section Vega uses Elena, the evil spirit herself, to narrate. She takes a moment to describe how she viewed men. She felt as if every man in the neighborhood had some sort of attraction to her, while she had no interest in them. She says, "They"d walk with me down the street. They"d sing under my window. None of it made much of an impression on me." (56) Elena goes on to describe how her relationship with her husband tragically ended. "What happened next was bound to happen. Manuel sharpened his knife and came home an hour early." (57) Unfortunately for Elena, however, she was murdered by her jealous husband and now seeks revenge by espiritismos, and is able to communicate with Violeta.
