In her short story, "Eleven", Sandra Cisneros writes from the perspective of an 11-year-old girl, Rachel. This immediately places the reader in a time zone of particular emotional sensitivity. Eleven, as the author obviously understands, is a very sensitive age, especially in a young girl's life. One is on the verge of a new stage of life – the teenage years. One emerges from childhood to pre-adulthood. This element makes the story particularly poignant, and connects the author with her readers on a very fundamental level. Moreover, she transcends the singular life stage of 11 years to also address the facts of growing up and older: a human being is an accumulation of experiences; some of these experiences are so intense that they are never forgotten, no matter how hard one tries; and even if one does live to be 102, as the author wishes she were, wisdom does always come with age. Like the author says, when you're eleven "...you're also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one".
             I was no exception to the average reader being particularly and profoundly moved by the story. In fact, it reminds me of a birthday in my own life. I was my tenth birthday, and I was also on the verge of "growing up", like Rachel. I felt so proud of myself, being all grown up and out of the "single figures". The speaker in the story doesn't however seem too excited about her birthday: "...when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don't. You open your eyes and everything's just like yesterday, only it's today." This is not the way I felt at all on my 10th birthday. But this is also the crux of Sandra Cisneros' story: the fact that the 11-year-old, and indeed any human being, is an accumulation of all the experiences that they had in their lives so far. Perhaps this philosophy is the r...