And of Clay Are We Created

In And of Clay are We Created, the author uses Acuzena to show Rolf how they are alike, and show how everyone has their own clay they are buried in. The author, Isabel Allende, wrote this story after seeing an event similar to this on the news in 1985. In the story, when Rolf finds Acuzena trapped in clay, he sees a lot more. This girl is trapped with no way out. No hope. All he needs is a pump to rescue her but no one will bring one. It makes him see himself in her, trapped in memories, trapped in the past.

We are all buried by something. Rolf was buried by memories of the war and what it did to his family, the rage of his father, and his guilt for the death of his sister. Everyone has things of the past that keep us from moving on, the way that Acuzena was held by the bodies of her brothers and sisters, which kept her from being pulled out of the quagmire. The author was trying to show us how in life, there will always be avalanches. We are just responsible for the way we deal with them.

The title, And of Clay are We Created, means that we all will have experiences throughout life, but we have the ability to be transformed from it. It can also be a spiritual reference to God creating from clay and then they ended covered in clay. The story really shows how someone can go their whole life hiding from something that they will never escape from until they dig in and climb out. It also shows how Rolf thought that he had left his past behind, but it resurfaced in this experience. He had to come to realize that his only way out of this was to accept death as Acuzena did in the end.