![]() ![]() In addition to its multiple temporal frames, Alvarez's text subsumes other genres and extraliterary material. The leading chapter in each section of the novel is narrated in the third person by Dede through the metafictive frame of her interactions in the present with a writer who, like Alvarez, has come to the Dominican Republic to interview her. Relying on a technique used in her other works of fiction, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), Yo! (1997), and In the Name of Salome (2000), Alvarez structured the novel with multiple narrators, the first-person voices of Minerva, Patria, and Maria Theresa narrating chapters in each of the work's three sections. The sisters' mythic status in Dominican culture posed a challenge for Alvarez: how to characterize these women in a compelling way by giving insight into their differing personalities and providing motivation for their choice to become involved in the highly dangerous underground movement against Trujillo. When Alvarez discovered in the early 1990s that a fourth Mirabal sister, Dede, was alive in the Dominican Republic, she interviewed her, and In the Time of the Butterflies grew out of that experience. Although officially reported as a car accident, the murder was exposed, and the sisters consequently gained the status of martyrs, earning a profound respect among the Dominican people that continues today, (1) Because Julia Alvarez's family emigrated from the Dominican Republic to the United States in 1960, when she was ten years old, as a result of her father's own dangerous involvement in the underground movement against Trujillo, she had long been fascinated by the legend of the Mirabals. However, in 1960 Trujillo's henchmen killed Patria, Minerva, and Maria Theresa Mirabal by ambushing their car on a mountain road as they returned from visiting their husbands in prison. With the code name of "Las Mariposas" or "The Butterflies," these three women joined an underground movement in the late 1950s against President Rafael Trujillo's dictatorship and became well known for their bravery and inspiration to others. Dominican American author Julia Alvarez's novel In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) is based upon the well-known Dominican story of the Mirabal sisters. ![]()
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