Space and place play important roles in expressing the messages writers intend for audiences to take away from their works. While both terms may have similar definitions, it is best to differentiate between the two in order to understand how significant they are in literature. Space simply regards the physical location within a story, while place can serve to be not only a location but also represent “one’s position in society” (Tuan, 408). Both the narrators in Yamamoto’s The Legend of Miss Sasagawara and Cisneros’s A House of My Own utilize key literary concepts of space and place in order to represent their experiences as two different ethnic groups. The key concepts of space and place are that they serve temporal and spatial roles respectively.…show more content… In turn, these elements describe the setting and served as indicators of the time period. In one example, “[Miss Sasagawara and Rev. Sasagawara were] newcomers to Block 33 … They were occupying one end of the Block’s lone empty barracks, which had not been chopped up yet into the customary four apartments” (20). Describing this setting to the reader allows him or her to imagine the space the characters are in. As they visualize a barricaded area, they can note what force placed these characters in such a space. Using the terms “Block” and “empty barracks” hinted that they were in an internment camp. In further analysis, the name “Sasagawara” is of Japanese origin. In context with these hints, readers can deduce the history involved within this story: any individual of Japanese ancestry residing in the US was forced to migrate to an internment camp during World War II. With this in mind, readers can place themselves as individuals in the story and imagine being a Japanese person living in a community dominated isolated from the rest of society. This temporal application within the space illustrated not only allows readers to understand the context of the characters’ situations, but also understand how significant the role space plays in enhancing their experience of comprehending the situation. While the Legend of Miss Sasagawara evidently shows the temporal component of space as well as narratively explain the circumstances of being a Japanese American in World War II, A House of My Own also presents this
