Story: The Bread of Salt Author: NVM Gonzalez Approach: Intertextual and Historical Analysis: Reading some of NVM

Gonzalezs short stories seems to be an advantage. I read some of his works apart from this way back high school for our English Elective class, Philippine Literatures. I wasnt surprised at all if there were a lot of similarities between protagonists from one story to another. The heroes of Gonzalezs stories are often young people on the cusp, on the brink of change. One could see that his characters were struggling, yet are caught in sociopolitical undercurrents, jetsam in a postcolonial ocean. There was always the presence of idyllic memories bind to be an outlet from poverty and oppression. He was, indeed, a nationalist writer as he depicts in his characters a spirit of patriotism. In some of his writings, he asserts, In the Philippines, colonization made us into a truly submerged people. Thus, his subject is constantly Filipino; he is to unearth what is essential and native from underneath the American and Spanish overlays of influence. Moreover, he wrote that even an alien language does not fail if it is employed in honest service to the scene, in evocation of the landscape and in celebration of the people one has known from birth. This is one of the myriad reasons why most of his works were written in the English language. His style in writing a prose and narrative poetry proceeds from modernist British and American writers Joyce James (whose Araby is very identical with Bread of Salt) and Henry James. The Bread of Salt revolves around a young man, a violinist; enamored of a mestiza beauty Aida gets a chance to impress her by playing at a party at her house. He was embarrassed, however, at the buffet table. The most Filipino element in the story was the pan de sal, which was referred to as the bread of salt. This is an allusion that portrays the violinist doing an errand a long-standing tradition of young Filipinos sent each morning to the bakery at a corner to buy pan de sal for the familys breakfast. The Bread of Salt is about coming to real life; awakening from a long-nights fantasy. The violinist/boy in the story is pushed aside down-to-earth life and sought dreams that could simply not come true.