An Explication of Julia Alvarez's "Snow"
... who is the little girl Yolanda, which is the voice of the narrator Julia Alvarez. In the beginning of the story Yolanda noticed “as the only immigrant in my class I was put in a special seat in the first row by the window apart from the other children (642).” From her point of view she felt isolated, because she had to be separated just so she couldn’t bother other children while Sister Zoe tutored her. The way Yolanda viewed things were different from the other children because of things she never heard or seen before but when she “picked up enough English (642)” the first thing she really heard about was the holocaust and understood that they were in the middle of a Cuban missiles crisis. She dramatizes what will happen if there were a bomb, she imagined “our hair falling out, the bones in our arms going soft (642).” Yolanda emphasizes too much about death for only being in the fourth grade. The diction of the story tells me a lot about Yolanda, especially the way she thinks because the only thing she really learned to understand was the holocaust. When Sister Zoe explained to the children what would happen if there were a bomb, she “drew a picture of a mushroom on the black board and dotted a flurry of chalk marks for the dusty fallout that would kill us all (642).” Immediately she already thought about dying, it shows that she fears what will happen if there was a bomb, there would be no chance for survival but only death, and imagined only about the “dusty fallout.” Finally one day Yolanda sat her desk “daydreaming out the window (642), she noticed some “dots in the air” without hesitation she yelled “Bomb! Bomb!” Even though she was daydreaming she was alert enough to realize what was happening, but to her realization, the dots was not a bomb it turned out to be snow. The “white crystals” that she heard all about but have not seen before changed her feelings, she was freighted one moment and then happy and curious about the dots that were falling from the sky. At the end when Sister Zoe said to Yolanda “each flake was different,” that’s when Yolanda knew that the snow “like a person, irreplaceable and beautiful” is different and distinctive. The conflict of the story is an external force on character it started out Yolanda learning simple and peaceful words like “laundromat, cornflakes, subway, snow” and then all of sudden she had to learn new words such as “nuclear bomb, radioactive fallout, bomb shelter” because “Russian missiles were being assembled, trained supposedly on New York City” everyone had to be prepared for what was going to happen. Yolanda and the other children would have “air-raid drills,” and President Kennedy explained that they might “have to go to war against the Communists.” What was once a peaceful environment turned into a di...