Genre
Autobiographical non-fiction
Setting and Context
New York City and Massachusetts in the 1980’s and 1990’s.
Narrator and Point of View
First-person narration from the author’s point of view. The perspective is an adult looking back on her younger self.
Tone and Mood
The tone is variable depending upon the circumstances and events being described. The mood, however, is always conveyed through lively detailed-oriented language.
Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonist: Liz Murray. Antagonist: The villains in this book are social abstractions: drug abuse, sexual abuse, economic inequality, the AIDS epidemic etc.
Major Conflict
The central conflict of the book pits Liz Murray against all those social forces working in unison to present obstacles to her desire to pursue and complete a higher education.
Climax
The climax is Liz’s being accepted into Harvard.
Foreshadowing
N/A
Understatement
N/A
Allusions
Though never explicitly confirmed, it is strongly alluded that Liz’s father was a Beatnik in his younger days through references to iconic figures of this movement: City Lights Bookstore, Alan Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac.
Imagery
The title derives from urban slang and the definition of that urban slang is conveyed through imagery: “Sometimes we would stay out until the dark sky grew light again—what we in the Bronx called “breaking night.”
Paradox
N/A
Parallelism
Memories of her mother dying of AIDS results in one of the few examples of parallelism found in the text: “I saw her laughing with me…and making wishes, the HIV virus already multiplying in her body. Her wish for me to stay in school, her wish for me to build a life of options, her wish for me to be okay.”
Metonymy and Synecdoche
“The Village” is utilized several times throughout the text as synecdoche to describe not just the geographical location of New York’s Greenwich Village, but a certain lifestyle commonly associated with it.
Personification
“Sam and I listened to the trees whispering their wind dance”
