The narrator wants to convey the horrendous sight of the red sweater which causes the central conflict in the story, so she utilizes vivid imagery to capture its ugliness:
It's an ugly sweater with red plastic buttons and a collar and sleeves all stretched out like you could use it for a jump rope. It's maybe a thousand years old...
This description, along with the fact that it "smells like cottage cheese," helps readers to empathize with being forced to wear a sweater not your own simply to pacify the authoritative adult in this situation.
There is also an example of hyperbole in that line of being "a thousand years old" to further capture the narrator's horror with being forced to wear a ratty old sweater.
The fact that the conflict happens on the narrator's birthday shows situational irony. On a day when she should be celebrated and when she keeps reminding herself of all the good things that await her, she doesn't even want to be eleven. She wants to be just about any other age so that she knows how to face this particular age. She doesn't feel eleven; she notes that you never feel like a "smart eleven" until you're almost twelve. She certainly doesn't feel special and celebrated on her birthday at school.
Despite the fact that it's her birthday, the narrator's tone is mournful and solemn. She looks at her years of experience with a sadness, noting that she sometimes feels much younger than her age and at other times longs for the wisdom of being older. In the end, she longs to fly away "like a runaway balloon," which is another simile that conveys her sadness at simply being eleven.
One literary device Cisneros uses in the short story "Eleven" is the diction of a child. Cisneros captures the voice and cadence of a real eleven-year-old. For example, she begins a sentence with "like," just as a child of that age might, and uses the word "stupid." This helps readers to believe they are overhearing the child's actual thoughts:
Like some days you might say something stupid, and that's the part of you that's still ten.
Cisnero uses the literary device of simile—a comparison that uses the words "like" or "as"—to capture the experience of an eleven-year-old, such as when the narrator compares being eleven to the rattle of "pennies in a tin Band-Aid box." We can imagine a child that age saving pennies and keeping them in an old Band-Aid box. (Maybe today it would quarters, but the idea is the same.)
Another literary device employed is polysyndeton. This means stringing together a series of conjunctions, such as "and." Cisernos uses this in the following to convey a sense of the tumbling quality of the narrator's thoughts:
I’m eleven and it's my birthday today and I'm crying like I'm three in front of everybody.
The numerous literary devices that Cisneros uses include point of view, diction, descriptive imagery, and figures of speech. The choice of the first-person narrator point of view is notable and especially appropriate for a memoir-like work of fiction. Rachel, the central character, narrates the events that occurred on her 11th birthday and shares with the reader her emotional reactions to those events. The narrative is not solely linear, for the author also employs stream of consciousness, as Rachel’s thoughts drift away from her classroom, and dialogue, for her exchanges with her teacher. In word choice, the diction is well suited to a girl her age and a person recalling highly emotional experiences. For figures of speech, similes abound: the ugly red sweater is “like a big red mountain.” Sometimes they appear in combination with metaphor, as when she tells us that years “rattle” and compares them to coins: “eleven years rattling inside me like pennies in a tin Band-Aid box.”
Sandra Cisneros uses several literary devices in her short story "Eleven." The most noticeable are point of view and simile.
"Eleven" is told from the perspective of a shy eleven-year-old. The author uses the first person point of view to depict what is happening internally to the narrator. The reader gets an intimate view of what thoughts the narrator has, and this helps build sympathy for the narrator. When her teacher gives the narrator an ugly sweater and insists that it is hers, the narrator is too timid to speak up and say that it is not hers. Inside, she thinks,
Not mine, not mine, not mine, but Mrs. Price is already turning to page thirty-two, and math problem number four. I don’t know why but all of a sudden I'm feeling sick inside, like the part of me that's three wants to come out of my eyes, only I squeeze them shut tight and bite down on my teeth real hard and try to remember today I am eleven, eleven.
Although this incident of receiving something that is not yours might seem insignificant to a lot of people, having the internal narration of the character helps the reader understand how nerve-wracking this event was for the narrator. It helps the reader empathize with her and remember what it was like to be young and hurt by something that someone else did.
Cisneros also uses several instances of simile. The narrator describes age by saying that "the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one." The narrator describes her point of view that when you turn a year older, you still have all the previous ages inside of you. She compares this to other things that have layers to explain her point.
Later, when the narrator tries to push the sweater away, she says, "I've shoved the red sweater to the tippy-tip corner of my desk and it’s hanging all over the edge like a waterfall." Just like a waterfall streams over a riverbed, the sweater hangs down over the edge of her desk.
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