The Stories of Eva Luna

In The Stories of Eva Luna, characters grapple with difficult circumstances including political unrest, war, abuse, and illness. As the characters navigate these challenges, Allende asserts that language and storytelling are tools for survival. More broadly, Eva Luna’s role as narrator and the motif of Eva as a modern Scheherazade reinforce the concept of storytelling as a coping mechanism.

In several instances, protagonists in The Stories of Eva Luna use creative language or storytelling to survive. A prominent example of this is Belisa Crepusculario in “Two Words,” the opening story of the collection. Belisa “[makes] her living selling words” (3), pulling herself out of poverty and building a profession that allows her to support herself and be independent. Even Belisa’s name is something that she crafted for herself: “[S]he herself had searched until she found the poetry of ‘beauty’ and ‘twilight’ and cloaked herself in it” (3). Through Belisa’s near-magical use of language to find her identity and establish her independence, Allende asserts that stories can be used to shape reality. In Belisa’s case, language enables her to make a name for herself and to develop a relationship with the powerful Colonel. Allende links her tale to real-life instances of revolutionary language and storytelling by using Belisa’s last name as an

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