In The Plum Plum Pickers, Raymond Barrio reveals his meaning of being human, particularly a man, in which one is not alive unless he or she surpasses oppression and self-degradation because it only holds him or her back from achieving the true honor and pride in being human. Barrio’s emphasizes on this state of being oppressed through his use of various short and detached sentence structures and the imagery of animals and machine to create the effect and allusion of a trapped nonhuman character in the first page of the story. However, by the climax, Manuel discovers a way to hinder oppression. Barrio then makes a subtle transition from the short and detached sentences to the long complete sentences and to the imagery of a unit. Manuel becomes a “man” of ideas and power, freeing him from oppression, and allowing him to be a human.
Manuel, the protagonist of the story, is a farm worker who works for hours and hours manually picking fruits. Immediately, the story reveals a sense of how Manuel views his life as he compares the farm to “an endless maze… like the blackest bars on the jails of hell”. Ultimately, he does not enjoy his life because his life is pretty much enclosed and jailed. He does not see his job as great fun, but rather like torture. Manuel appears to be in this morbid state where he‘s struggling for “living moisture” and pleading for a way out for “there had to be a way out” much like a man in jail who is “trapped”. Then these one word sentences start to appear and it’s as if these words are randomly popping into Manuel’s head. They’re like short moments of consciousness for Manuel and also words that describe him like “Beast” or “Brute”, all adjectives or nouns with a negative impression, making him seem filthy and caveman-like. The usage of short sentences also establishes time. The word “Lunch” is placed in its own paragraph that the time period of lunch seems so short. Before, there was a long description of his day, but then “Lunch” is only said in one single detached word that it almost appears insignificant to the story. The time to eat for Manuel is like a 4 seconds break and then its back to the endless work and “the endlessly unending piling up of bucket upon box upon crate upon stack upon rack upon mound upon mountain”. By making this long sentences constantly repeats the word “upon”, it creates the feel of an unending surplus of work burdening him from doing anything else.
Not only is Manuel oppressed by the setting of the farm and the work, but also in every time that he comes close to describing himself and telling more. Short phrases would cut him off from the story. Phrases like “The trees. The branches again…The ladder”. All these phrases are not even important to the story nor are there any verbs involved, yet they are able to over power Manuel’s significance in the story. Unable to do anything about his life, Manuel becomes even more oppressed as “he was too tired even to curse” when Roberto took order over him. Spiritually and emotionally, Manuel demonstrates carelessness and a lack of motivation to be living or be human as it repetitively describes him as being “tired” and “exhausted”. He’s “truly a refined wreck of an animal”. Manuel is clearly like an animal in the story, one who resembles a lazy pig and a “predator” because he’s easily bullied by Roberto, “the cannibal”, and by men of higher status. Once again, another one sentence paragraph, “Mid afternoon” appears. The movements of time passes by him ever so suddenly again and the process continues with a pattern of big paragraph, one sentence paragraph, etc for rest of the first page of the story. The paragraphs are so composed and structured that in an overview, the structure looks a bit robotic and mechanical like Manuel himself. His life is basically work, lunch, work, afternoon, work, and end. He’s like this machine that is programmed to do that amount of work each day.
However, when the day “Ended!”, everything negative of Manuel also ended. Instead, he becomes this totally different man with an unexpected aura of confidence where he had to “keep his temper from flaring.” Manuel never seemed to care much for Roberto Morales before when he yelled at him, but Manuel was definitely changing. Now all the pickers “gasped as one”. In the beginning of the story, it focused mainly on himself or on only one person, but now there is this imagery of pride. When people do things together, they share something in common and it shows unity among them. This unity in humans was not seen in the beginning, but rather Manuel “felt alone though surrounded by other pickers”. The sentence structure now is also different from before. Rather than having pure 3rd person perspective of the story. There is now dialogue and long detailed sentences. Manuel is depicted much more as a human now. He speaks and he is concise in establishing what is right and wrong. In kicking the second bucket, the fruits roll “in all direction” as if opening new paths for Manuel to take.
Through taking risk to break free from oppression of the world, Manuel is able to discover that men are built to count for something and to experience honor and pride; likewise to Robert Barrio’s meaning of being human. Successfully, Barrio was able to depict the feeling of being deeply oppressed by the surrounding to the point of nonexistence because if one continues to conform to what is wrong for “hour upon hour”, it will become “decades upon decades“ and life would just be as if he or she is “dead before they die.”
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