What I found most interesting about “Woman Hollering Creek” was the way Sandra Cisneros manipulated the narrative voice throughout the story. Although the story mostly had a third person omniscient point of view, it was also malleable by transitioning into first and second person too. For instance, when Juan Pedro was scolding Cleofilas, the narrative voice shifted form third person to second person: “so why can’t you just leave me in peace, woman” (p. 223), as if we as readers took on Cleofilas’s point of view and the narrator became Juan. The narrator had also morphed into Cleofilas in the scene where she tries to convince Juan to take their their son to the doctor: “Yes. Next Tuesday at five-thirty. I’ll have Juan Pedrito dressed and ready. (…) As soon as you come home from work. We wont make you ashamed” (p. 226). It is clear that Cleofilas was addressing the reader as if they were Juan. Additionally, even when the narrator remained in third person, it wasn’t difficult to notice their bias in favour of Cleofilas, pleading to Juan: “She has to go back [to the doctor] next Tuesday Juan Pedro, please, for the new baby. For their child” (p. 226).

The reader’s constant awareness of Cleofilas’s situation and their emotional involvement can be distinguished as metafiction. Metafiction in this case serves to highlight the parallels between Cisneros’s fictitious world and the real world where generational trauma and domestic abuse is a reality for many Mexican Americans, outside of fiction. It’s one thing to learn about the issues of domestic violence via reading statistics or news reports, but it’s another to personally experience or be able to empathize with the victims of such tragedies. Cisneros utilizes pathos, in the form of metafiction, so that her readers can empathize with the characters in her story, which consequently emphasizes the gravity of the issues at stake.