Analysis of Setting the Scent of Apples by Bienvenido Santos

The air within Celestina Fabia’s secluded home was perfumed with the foreign scent of apples. The immigrant had been living in Kalamazoo for more than 20 years when he met a speaker from his native land who had come to the US to lecture; he drove out to the city hear this man. The crowd’s questions during the open forum centered on Fabia’s home country. To this Fabia stands and asks if the women now were the same 20 years ago and the lecturer responds that they were. Thereafter Fabia invites the lecturer to dinner with his American wife, Ruth, and his son, Roger. The next day Fabia picks the speaker up from the hotel and drives him to a farm east of the city into a rugged road that led into an isolated farm. It held a crumbling and shanty†¦show more content†¦Bienvenido Santos brings to his audience the sentiments of nostalgia. The well-crafted short, â€Å"the Scent of Apples† very well articulates the loneliness of an immigrant. He does this thr ough how he establishes the setting, through how he sets up the stage for the characters to move around and for the audience to get a better feel of what Santos intended to impart. The loneliness is palpable in the setting and his use of it gives subtlety to the theme isolation inShow MoreRelatedAnalysis of Setting: the Scent of Apples by Bienvenido Santos1038 Words   |  5 PagesThe air within Celestina Fabia’s secluded home was perfumed with the foreign scent of apples. The immigrant had been living in Kalamazoo for more than 20 years when he met a speaker from his native land who had come to the US to lecture; he drove out to the city hear this man. The crowd’s questions during the open forum centered on Fabia’s home country. To this Fabia stands and asks if the women now were the same 20 years ago and the lecturer responds that they were. Thereafter Fabia invites the Analysis of Setting the Scent of Apples by Bienvenido Santos The air within Celestina Fabia’s secluded home was perfumed with the foreign scent of apples. The immigrant had been living in Kalamazoo for more than 20 years when he met a speaker from his native land who had come to the US to lecture; he drove out to the city hear this man. The crowd’s questions during the open forum centered on Fabia’s home country. To this Fabia stands and asks if the women now were the same 20 years ago and the lecturer responds that they were. Thereafter Fabia invites the lecturer to dinner with his American wife, Ruth, and his son, Roger. The next day Fabia picks the speaker up from the hotel and drives him to a farm east of the city into a rugged road that led into an isolated farm. It held a crumbling and shanty†¦show more content†¦During the lecture, the narrator receives a lot of questions about his home country, which he describes had become a lost country to his American audience. Here his audience was composed of mostly w omen who had lost contact with the men deployed in the Philippines. Their situation is parallel to Fabia’s, with his family closing their gates after him and his loss of contact with any Filipino for the past years, which emphasizes his isolation. Juxtaposing Ruth with the narrator’s commentary on the differences of Filipino and American women, and Fabia’s description of Filipino women entails that there may be no differences between these groups of women at all. To emphasize Remarking on Ruth being described like a Filipina, she stays with Fabia even on the brink of death, while she herself was pregnant. The she maybe home that he finds in the US. In relation to the setting, his link to the Philippines no longer persists and the dinner with narrator was the Fabia’s soiree with his old home, but his being released back into the cold and dark at the end implies that Fabia still feels the abandonment and isolation. Fabia’s shanty home emphasizes thi s isolation in exile as well, since the house is located alone amidst an apple orchard miles away from the city. The narrator described the trip from Kalamazoo to the farm to be interminable; they disappeared through thickets, passed narrow lanes withShow MoreRelatedAnalysis of Setting: the Scent of Apples by Bienvenido Santos1023 Words   |  5 PagesThe air within Celestina Fabia’s secluded home was perfumed with the foreign scent of apples. The immigrant had been living in Kalamazoo for more than 20 years when he met a speaker from his native land who had come to the US to lecture; he drove out to the city hear this man. The crowd’s questions during the open forum centered on Fabia’s home country. To this Fabia stands and asks if the women now were the same 20 years ago and the lecturer responds that they were. Thereafter Fabia invites the