Fruit and Hope

The title of Aimee Bender’s story “Fruit and Hope” is very interesting to me in that the words fruit and hope are metaphors for not only the story but the main character. The woman had just broken up with her boyfriend and had a sudden urge to have a mango. Lo and behold, in the middle of the desert, she came across a stand on the side of the road selling mangos. After further examination of the establishment, the woman finds the word “hope”; the word symbolizing the actually feeling of course.

She breaks the word hope and in all sense losing it. However, the woman was looking for mangos and she found them. Being as she had just ran from her wedding, it is indicative that she was also looking for hope that she had somehow lost somewhere along the road. She found hope in the same place she had found the mango, however, unlike the mango’s, she could not acquire hope. The mango's where a representation of her life and at the end of the story, she only kept the mango pit. By throwing the rest away, she was throwing her life away as she knew it and the seed was a metaphor for the small piece of memories in which she would need to grow a new life from.

(Behrouz Ashrafi, 1)