The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros is a story about a boy who does not like the new home they are living in. In it the narrator starts off by telling the readers that they have moved from place to place, and every time they move there is an additional person with them. He thought the house on Mango Street would be a nice house like the one his father and mother used to describe. Little did he know that the house on Mango Street is not what he imagined and finds great embarrassment in living there. Cisneros shows that we are use to dreaming of high expectations and when we come back into reality we find out that life is just playing its tricks on us.
The main character in this story is the narrator. He is shown as being a round character because he has a couple of sides to his personality. The narrator starts off criticizing his family on how it tends to get bigger every time they move. This is shown when he says, "Each time it seemed there"d be one more of us." He is also critical about the places he has stayed and what he expects out of moving to a new place. He says, "The house on Mango Street is ours, and we don't have to pay rent to anybody, or share the yard with the people downstairs, or be careful not to make too much noise." He is expecting to move to a better place where they will not have to worry about all those things. When he faces reality at the end he feels as if he had been betrayed because he thinks people look down on him because of where he lives. An example is, "I knew then I had to have a house. A real house. One I could point to. But this isn't it.".
There is an internal conflict in the story between the narrator and himself. He wants one thing but ends up getting something that is the exact opposite. He says, "Bricks are crumbling in places, and the front door is so swollen that you have to push hard to get in." He realizes that what he wants in life is not easy to get.