And Of Clay Are We Created Summary

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In life there are two types of tragedy; personal tragedy, and collective tragedy. Personal tragedy would be the loss of a loved one, while it may not affect many people if affects oneself deeply. Collective tragedy is what is usually portrayed on the news by the media. Although having different settings “Watching Death, Live on Cable” by Slavenka Drakulic, and “And of Clay Are We Created” by Isabelle Allende, share the theme of how media is causing tragedy to lose its meaning. The two short stories portray this theme through use of imagery, symbolism, and setting. The two texts use imagery to portray the loss of the significance of tragedy in the media. The media often shows graphic scenes of horrific tragedies without blinking an eye. Normally…show more content…
With so much tragedy being transmitted to the population, the emotion gets turned off; “Slowly, and without noticing it, a hardness has crept over us, an inability to see the truth” (Drakulic ). This speaks to the people, about the people; watching all the tragedy happen on television has caused a hardness to creep over us which stops us feeling sad for the people living in the condition depicted. Also a hardness which cause us to turn a blind eye to the fact that the media is reporting all this awful news when in reality they don’t do anything to help. However much the stations send out headlines with a sad connotation, the media thrives by selling the news to the population. Furthermore, as seen in “And of Clay Are We Created”, the government can often jump on the band wagon of appearing to help, “[The President of the Republic] waved his limp statesmen’s hand, and microphones recorded his emotional voice and paternal tone as he told her [Azucena] that her courage has served as an example to the nation” (Allende ). Shown here is how the government is similar to the media in the way that the President does nothing to help the girl even when he says he will; “the President assured him […] that he personally would attend to the matter” (…) This relates to the fact that the media always looks like they are doing something to help and we can no longer see the
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