Poetic Prose
The writing style of "Eleven" creates what literary aficionados call stream of consciousness. Not only is stream of consciousness an horribly long label for such a short story, but it's also associated with some of modernism's most intimidating works: As I Lay Dying, To the Lighthouse, and, the shelf-bending burden of book collections everywhere, Ulysses. But worry not, intrepid Shmooper, it's not all that bad.
Stream of consciousness simply means we are privy to the narrator's thoughts as they occur to him or her. Imagine you're streaming a live feed of someone's thoughts, and you've got the basic idea. The writing style of "Eleven" illustrates this concept in an entirely user-friendly manner:
Not mine, not mine, not mine, but Mrs. Price is already turning to page thirty-two, and math problem number four. I don't know why but all of a sudden I'm feeling sick inside, like the part of me that's three wants to come out of my eyes, only I squeeze them shut tight and bite down on my teeth real hard and try to remember today I am eleven, eleven. Mama is making a cake for me for tonight, and when Papa comes home everybody will sing Happy birthday, happy birthday to you. (12)
Cisneros' word choice and sentence structure both illustrate the stream of consciousness writing style. The use of so many commas connects all the thoughts together. If the sentences were broken up with more periods, then they would read like distinct thoughts: First this. Then that. And finally, this.
But here, all the commas connect the thoughts of feeling sick, squeezing your eyes shut, biting down on your teeth, and remembering it's your birthday together into one jumbled thought-cluster. The rambling nature of this tone makes sense to us because our thoughts generally do come to us in frenzied clusters like this, especially during trying circumstances.
The repeated word choice also illustrates a story coming directly from inside a person's mind. A writer could simply write "not mine" once to get the point across, but writing it three times like in the passage above makes it feel like we're inside Rachel's mind. She's repeating something important to herself over and over, something we've all done from time to time.
The word choice is also very simple and straightforward. There are no big, academic sounding words to be had, and the words we have here perfectly fit what you'd expect to find in the mind of an eleven-year-old.