Helena of paris
...escent, those grey roofs, those grey posts, those patches of green between the sandstone chimneys, the flapping sheets on the line, the plump arms of the women doing their washing, all filled me with nausea and a desire to run away” (27). This shows that the narrator came from a lower class family living in a small town in Spain. On the other hand, Montalban describes Helena’s childhood saying, “Like a character out of some novel by Vicki Baum or Lajos Zilahy, her father was a powerful businessman, a widower, who took his only daughter with him wherever he went” (28). This proves that Helena came from a higher societal class than the narrator, and that her childhood travels sparked her crave to live abroad in life and to be free. The class division and the way both characters were brought up are barriers for their permanent marriage and lead to alternating lifestyles. Next, both the narrator and Helena achieve freedom that involve two totally different paths that can be shown by analyzing the plot and sequence of events that occur in Montalban’s story. The road abroad in France that Helena chooses affects the narrator and causes him to try to be more successful and leave his job of editing a dictionary. On the other hand, after Helena marries, the narrator’s goals in life shift inward which ultimately lead to his isolation. The narrator says, “The fact of Helena’s marriage afforded me a comfortable amount of suffering which I tried to extend for as long as possible, but Helena herself prevented me from extending it too much” (Montalban 30). As the narrator and Helena began their occasional visits, a love triangle arises as the two characters begin to sleep with each other. This in turn leads to Helena’s divorce, which the narrator opposed as he says, “The idea of Helena getting a divorce suddenly threw up new unknowns, a new balance of things, and I found it alarming” (33). This event in the plot is the turning point that leads to the freedom of both the main characters. Soon after the divorce, Helena disappears along with her letters to the narrator and she returns to a period of travel with her father. And the narrator ultimately falls into a daily, mid-life routine confined to his apartment in the same town where he grew up. He describes his state of living saying, “The fact is, I’m beginning to feel more and more at home with the four-cornered view that I get from this window, and with the sense of freedom that I get from being ale to sit out on my balcony...” (34). Ironically, the story ends with both the narrator and Helena returning to their beginnings to find their freedom. Helena goes back to traveling with her widowed father and the narrator stays in the same vicinity as his childhood days. This supports the argument that freedom can be achieved by living different lifestyles that doesn’t have to come along with success. Helena became a socialite in Paris to realize that something brought her back to Spain, which tells the reader that success is not an appropriate measure of freedom in one’s life. This is proven with the narrator’s nonchalant and routine lifestyle that he chooses rather than the road abroad. The narrator describes Helena saying, “Undoubtedly Helena was my voyage and my hope” (29). Finally, the author’s use of figurative language gives the reader a picture of how freedom is achieved by both the main characters of the story. Montalban uses such devices as situational irony, similes and metaphors, imagery to describe the setting of the story, and a type of diction and sentence structure that leads to the tone of the story. For example, the irony produced by the outcome of the story is that although the narrator chooses a life of dormancy, he finally achieves freedom in his comfort zone rather than abroad, which he first wanted to do. After revealing to the reader in the beginning of the story that his childhood setting gave him a desire to run away, the narrator then says, “I go through onto the balcony and I remember back to when I used to go round that...