In the novel Dreaming in Cuban, written by Cristina García, each character has an unique way of expressing and dealing with its own emotions. The passage starting with “Felicia del Pino doesn’t know what brings on her delusions” (75) and ending with “[s]he never knows the time” (76) particularly addresses how the character Felicia del Pino deals with her mental illness. It is through the imagery of sound and sight, as well as the use of other figures of speech, that Felicia is able to communicate the pain behind her loneliness and inability to fit in.

The opening sentence of the chosen passage introduces Felicia’s awareness of her own mental illness as well as her inability, or perhaps reluctance, to understand what causes it as the third-person narrator mentions that Felicia “doesn’t know what brings on her delusions” (75). Her madness is further highlited at the ending sentence of the chosen passage, as she is said to “never [know] time” (76) which proves that there is a break from reality. Furthermore, the emphasis on the adverb “never” makes her condition an unending problem, as there is no hope of it changing anytime soon. It is as if the narrator wants the reader to feel Felicia’s despair dragging her down. To express her inner suffering, she has developed a deep sense of hearing as the narrator states that “she can hear things” (75). This statement is later rectified as “ she can hear everything” (75) and as the passage progresses, the vocabulary is more and more assertive. Indeed, the uncertainty that comes with the modal verb “can” is later erased with the affirmation: “She hears [the people] talking but cannot understand what they say” (75-76).

The sense of sound is a a key element in the understanding of Felicia’s madness. The first paragraph of chapter six is full of words of the lexical field of sound such as: “hear,” “every sneeze and creak and breath” (75) which shows how Felicia’s painful sense of hearing mirrors the pain she feels in her life. The emphasis on “every” and the way she compares those sounds to “[t]he scratching a beetle on a porch” and “[t]he shifting of the floorboards in the night” (75) foregrounds the uneasiness and unpleasantness that comes with hearing everyone and everything’s noises constantly. The only way to “lessen the din” is to loudly play “the Beny Moré records […] warped as they are” (75) whose voice comes to replace the others and to stand for her own. The only way for her to have a break from these sounds is to play a music even louder than her own thoughts. Also, the fact that the records are bent mirrors the distorted view she has of reality as well. Although she is aware of the sounds surrounding her, the problem seems to lay in her inability to understand “what [people] say” (76) and her inability to speak the same language.

In the Reader’s Guide at the end of the book (247-58), Cristina García mentions how her first intention was to make Dreaming in Cuban a poem. Although she later changed her mind and wrote a novel, the particularities of poetry remained. For example, each sentence in the quote: “The scratching of a beetle on the porch. The shifting of the floorboards in the night” (75) has ten syllables. This iambic pentameter pattern is typical in the poetic genre. The repetition of the determinant “the” appears four times and the rhymes in “-ing” all contribute to the lyrical tone of the novel. As for the alliteration of the vowel sound “ee,” is also reiterated many times. The fact that these sounds appear constantly in the text, parallels the sound Felicia hears in her head. The use of rhymes makes certain words stand out and induces the reader to make connections between them. The second sentence of the chosen passage, for example, uses rhymes finishing in “-ly” such as: “only,” “suddenly,” and “vividly” (75) which emphasize the way Felicia has a very detailed sense of hearing. The rhyming words “luminosity” and “enemy” (75) can also be linked together and give us an idea that Felicia sees light as a very hostile thing. Not only do all these repeated sounds give the text a sort of musicality but they also give fundamental information about the character.

After the sense of sound, comes the sense of sight, which appears mostly in the second paragraph of the chosen passage. Felicia’s mood is decreasing due to the unstoppable sounds inside her head and this can also be sensed with the disappearance of colors one by one, moving her out of brightness and into darkness. Each color has a symbolic value and each moves away from Felicia, thus showing how her mood influences her surroundings and vice-versa. Symbolically perceived as the color of passion and love, the color red is personified as it “floats above the carnations” (75). Then, the color blue, which is said to stimulate the sense of calm “ rise[s] from the chipped tiles” (75) leaving Felicia in her own anxiety. Her favorite color green “flees the trees” (75) which can signify that there is not even hope left. The emphasis on “even the greens” (75) conveys a sense of fatality since she is left with black and white. Felicia enters thus a monotone and monochromatic stage. The white, with its overpowering intensity, erases all of the colors around. Felicia even goes as far as to feel “assault[ed]” and “threaten[ed]” (75) by its luminosity. She is so scared that she “tightens the shutters” (75) of her windows, not allowing any ray of sun to come. In a way, the whiteness symbolizes the outside and real world which she feels attacked by and the darkness, her inside world as she physically closes herself from emotions or even from people that she does not understand.

Her isolation is established by the fact that she secludes herself at home, rarely “dar[ing] [to] look outside” (75). When she does so, she compares people to paintings who are “outlined in black, their faces crushed and squarish” (75). She describes people as being two-dimensional, flat and oddly shaped which highlights how distant and different she feels they are to her. In a way, she fears their judgement as the third person narrator states that “their white shining eyes” are what makes her feel “threaten[ed]” (75). The human characteristics that she removes from people, Felicia gives to objects. In fact, this inversion can be seen with the use of prosopopeias, as she gives a human action to the concept of color: “The colors too, escape their objects” (75) which she herself is unable to do.

In conclusion, it is through the metaphor of the senses that the reader gets to understand how Felicia’s break from both reality and human contact has clearly contributed to her madness. It also shows how Felicia expresses her emotions since what she is unable to articulate with words, Felicia communicates with sounds and colors, which is a language on its own.