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  • Essay / Purpose of Communication in “The Dew Breaker”

    Many people in today's world have difficulty communicating. In the literature, many authors use communication as a means of either creating relationships or creating barriers. In the novel The Dew Breaker, by Edwidge Danticat, many characters have difficulty communicating about their past, while others manage to accept it. This is shown throughout the novel, however, three stories that show this in particular are "Seven", "Night Talkers", and "Monkey Tails". Danticat uses communication to represent a theme that the more people communicate about their pasts and secrets, the easier it is for them to accept them. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original EssayIn the novel's second story, "Seven," a man and his wife are introduced. They haven't seen each other for seven years. After this long separation, barrier formation begins to occur. They know that they missed each other and that they love each other, but they don't really know how to behave around each other. The situation is almost delicate. The husband is even afraid of how to tell his wife that he loves her. He thinks about it first and says, "It's a shame that in Creole the word for love, renmen, is also the word for love" (Danticat 43), so instead of just saying I love you, he should use it in a sentence to explain how much he loved her. Due to the seven-year separation, he didn't know what to add, so he didn't say anything at all. This and the business neither shares with the other all adds to the barrier. There is also a language barrier between them. The husband, having lived in America seven years before his wife's arrival, got used to his life. While the woman finds it very difficult because not only does she not know the city, but she doesn't speak English, which creates another communication barrier between her and the world around her. The more time they go without communicating about their last seven years, the more the barrier between them grows. Danticat uses this barrier of lack of communication to support the theme that the more you hide your past, the harder it will be to move forward. The next story that represents the theme of communication is "Night Talkers". Nocturnal talkers are “people who wet their beds, not with urine but with words” (98). This chapter has this title because many characters have this characteristic. The first night talker we meet is Estina and Dany. Dany is a young man living in New York who returns home to Haiti to tell his aunt Estina that he discovered the man who killed his parents years ago. Estina doesn't care to think about that past terror that she and Dany experienced, instead she embraces her past and isn't ashamed of it. This is not the case for Dany, although he is determined to live in the past and discuss it with Estina. One of Dany's "talkiest nights", he dreams of finishing his conversation with his aunt about the man who killed his parents, when his own voice shakes him. When he wakes up, he finds that his aunt is also awake. Once she falls asleep, he hears her muttering words in her sleep as well, eventually becoming the last words he ever heard from her. The last talker we met was Claude. Danticat portrays Claude as a luckier night talker because instead of just talking about his nightmares out loud, he is also able to talk about his nightmares to others. However, it cannot always do this because of the English language barrier. This chapter concerns the.