Dawn of Madness
Close reading of page 75 and the 1st paragraph of page 76 of Christina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban
In Christina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban, the reader discovers Felicia Del Pino as a crazy character by plunging in her thoughts. Throughout the passage, the third-person narrator does a character focalization on Felicia by setting out the situation she endures. Her hallucinations allow her to observe and listen things very distinctly. Despite her craziness, she demonstrates a clarity in her words regarding what she sees, hears and thinks. The essay will focus on page 75 from “Felicia del Pino doesn’t know” to “It is worse when she closes her eyes” in page 76. It will enable to discover her overdeveloped senses and her tangle of thoughts. Throughout the narrative voice’s expressions, figures of speech and lexical fields, the depiction of Felicia allows the readers to make an image of this woman’s deep imagination. In the description of Felicia in the beginning of the passage, the sudden increase of her sensorial abilities, as well as her thoughts makes the reader feeling small next to Felicia’s competence.
The intensification of sounds within Felicia’s head influences her sensitiveness to noises and damages her mind. Felicia does not know what happened to her, she “doesn’t know what brings on her delusions” (75). Her confusing situation gives to the “delusions” (75) a negative connotation. Theses hallucinations prompted an apparition of sounds that have a harmful effect to Felicia’s health. The multiplication of sounds is driving her crazy as perceived by the narrative voice saying that “they call to her all at once, grasping for parts of her” (75). Here again, the verb “grasp” (75) has also a negative connotation because it has a weigh on her brain. Each time the third-person narrator specifies that she hears another sound, it emphasizes the din and reinforces the mess in her head. When the narrator underlines that Felicia “can hear everything in this world and others, every sneeze and creak and breath in the heavens or the harbour or the gardenia tree down the block” (75) she mentions several noises from different places. The adverb “everything” (75) exaggerates the turn of this declaration and outlines this sentence as a hyperbole. Besides, small noises like a “sneeze” (75), a “creak” (75) and a “breath” (75) join the same lexical field of sounds and expose the extent of her craziness. Seeing that she hears them in “heavens” (75) and in the “harbour” (75) confirms that she is insane. The term “heavens” (75) symbolizes her mental state because she constantly seems to be in her own world. Felicia gives the sensation that she is feeling oppressed by all the information coming to her mind.
Felicia’s sight is another sense that makes her feel both lucid and crazy. Her perception of the colours creates a poetic turn to the narrator’s declaration. The assonance “even the greens, her favourite shades of greens, flee the trees and assault her with luminosity” (75) seeks to make poetic this form of sentence. On the other hand, within this assonance, the metaphor “flee the trees” (75) displays the kind of images that are built in her head. It is meant to plunge Felicia in a madness by creating a character who sees weird things. Thereby, Felicia’s own representation of the colours has both a poetic and a crazy aspect in the extended metaphor from “the colours, too, escape their objects” (75) to “assault her with luminosity” (75). Another element that makes her an insane character is her objectification of the human being. Indeed, when Felicia looks outside “the people are paintings, outlined in black, their faced crushed and squarish” (75). She dehumanizes people because something is real only if she can touch it that is why the narrator says that “nothing is solid until she touches it” (75). This metaphor is used to say that Felicia only believes what is real, what she can touch.
Felicia’s thoughts are, at the same time, fragmented by her reason and her hallucinations. A metaphor is used to depict what is happening within Felicia’s head by saying that her “mind floods with thoughts” (76). Thereby, it creates an imagery to explain with water how full is her mind. She is in some way drowning herself in her thoughts, they are too numerous, especially because they are from “the past” (76), “the future” (76) and from “other people” (76). Besides, telling that Felicia’s mind is full of thoughts “from the past, from the future, other people’s thoughts” (76) is perceived as a hyperbole because it is exaggerated to say that she reached to know other people thoughts. She does not have any power to do that and in this example, her delusions took over her reason. Moreover, there is a second hyperbole in the same paragraph to describe Felicia’s tangle of thoughts since the narrative voice declares that “every idea seems to her connected to thousands of others” (76). Felicia overestimates her cognitive competence saying that “thousands” (76) of ideas seem connected to hers. The third-person narrator mentions a comparison that symbolizes her mental state, by saying “she jumps from one to another like a nervous circus horse” (76) speaking about her ideas. The adjective “nervous” (76) is used to compare Felicia’s state to a “nervous circus horse” (76). Therefore, this adjective takes a negative connotation which illustrates the damage that causes her hallucinations. However, some thoughts are real and the narrator did not forget to mention that. When it is related that “Things come back as symbol, bits of conversation, a snatch of an old church hymn” (76) it is an allusion to the time when Felicia used to go to church with her sister and her father. Besides, in the next paragraph Felicia mentions these memories, so it shows that there is still a part of lucidity in her thoughts that makes her struggle against her delusions.
Through a variety of figures of speech, this passage presents Felicia, a character who is flooded by her delusions but also lucid in her description of thoughts. The strong presence of technical features in this passage makes fascinating the reading of this book. The narrator’s monologue provides a distinct way to understand and imagine how messy are Felicia’s thoughts. Indeed, the reader discovers someone who is trapped by her two senses, that is the sight, the hearing as well as her thoughts.