The Things They Carried

Within the story, the person talking is a friend of Cruz. The poem is talking about a girl who is disfigured, having a humpback. Imagery is used when talking about the mother, in line 4 the mother is unsmiling which gives the woman a sort of unmoved feel where she isn't happy but isn't sad. Also in the first stanza it talks about the symbol of a family's shame, where the symbol is possibly the girl with the humpback. In the second stanza, the baby being twisted into a question mark and then it talks about the "eternal why" which could be reference to why did this have to happen to us. The mother has named her Cruz, as perhaps because of the burden on the family since it says she was named after the cross Christ bore. There is a simile line 20, "made of stuck together parts, like a child's first attempt at cutting and pasting a paper doll". In the third stanza they (the family) act as if nothing is wrong with the girl even though they say that the head sits on the body incongruously. In the forth stanza it talks about how the girl would play her favorite game family. They would make believe the perfect family, and how they would get lost in this game until it was time to go back home. Possibly some of the subtext that could be within this story is that some people are the same even though they seem to be different. Or another subtext could be that even though they might be different on the outside they still like the same things on the inside.