A_Man_That_Is_Trapped

A man who doesn’t state his name is stuck on a street with no way out. This man describes his experience while he is in this “street”. At the end of this experience this man who doesn’t have a name simply says that he I nobody. In “The Street”, Octavio Paz writes about a dead man that is trapped in a maze with no connection to the outside world and since this is happening, this man thinks he is nobody. During the first part of this man’s experience he is seen walking on a street that seems to have no ending to it. While is having this experience he is stepping on dry leaves “… my feet stepping on silent stones and dry leaves”. This man is all alone on a silent street stepping on dry leaves. He’s stepping on silent stones, but if you step on dry leaves, they make sounds, so that might be a sign that something is significant about these dry leaves. Dry leaves are dead so, the author might be sending a message to the reader stating that the main character of this poem might be a dead person stuck in a maze. After he experiences the dry leaves; he notices that someone is following him “Someone behind me also stepping on stones, leaves”. This someone is following him and the protagonist doesn’t see him, but at the end of this experience this unnamed man finds out that this someone is him: nobody. At the middle of this man’s experience in the street he still notices that someone is still following him and along with that he soon notices that he has no way out of this street. This someone is still following the protagonist so he says this “If I run, he runs. I turn: nobody” The protagonist is saying that someone is copying his every move while following him. If someone is copying the protagonist’s every move then that someone might just be the protagonist because the protagonist is just seeing his own self. After the experience with the unknown person, the protagonist starts to realize he is trapped because he describes the street like this “Everything dark and doorless”. By saying this, the protagonist is describing how “The Street” looks like. This street is dark because the protagonist cannot see anything and it is doorless because there is no way out, so as a conclusion there is no way out of this maze and there is no way in. Along with that, there might be no connections to the outside world meaning that has no connections to any of his peers or relatives. When the man comes to end of his experience in the street he will realize two major answers to the questions he was wondering about at the beginning of his experience. The two questions were who was following him and whether or not this street was really a trap that was made for him. Towards the end of this man’s experience he is seen turning corners of the street so this comes up “Turning and turning among these corners”. The unnamed protagonist is turning at every corner he sees on “The street” but he just ends right back up on the street. All along the protagonist is in a maze which is the street that has corners to turn but no way out. Soon he realizes that the street is a trap what will let nobody out and nobody in. After that, the protagonist stumbles upon a man that answers his last question “Where I pursue a man who stumbles and rises and says when he sees me: Nobody”. The protagonist is confronting a man that he doesn’t recognize. After confronting this man he realized that the man he stumbled upon was him, because those shadows that he thought he saw was just him seeing his own self. Now, this answers his second question because all along he was going in a circle only seeing a reflection of his own body. This unnamed protagonist goes through an experience that involves him being stuck on a street with no way out. When the man comes to the end of this mysterious experience he realizes that he is nobody because he is simply trapped in on a street. In a piece of poetry called “The Street”, Octavio Paz writes about a dead man that is stuck on a street with no connections to the outside world, so as a result of this, the unnamed protagonist calls him self nobody.