Within the story, the person talking is a friend of Cruz. The poem is talking about a girl who is disfigured, having a humpback. Imagery is used when talking about the mother, in line 4 the mother is unsmiling which gives the woman a sort of unmoved feel where she isn't happy but isn't sad. Also in the first stanza it talks about the symbol of a family's shame, where the symbol is possibly the girl with the humpback. In the second stanza, the baby being twisted into a question mark and then it talks about the "eternal why" which could be reference to why did this have to happen to us. The mother has named her Cruz, as perhaps because of the burden on the family since it says she was named after the cross Christ bore. There is a simile line 20, "made of stuck together parts, like a child's first attempt at cutting and pasting a paper doll". In the third stanza they (the family) act as if nothing is wrong with the girl even though they say that the head sits on the body......

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Title: The Things They Carried
Approximate Word Count: 290
Approximate Pages: 2 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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