BLESS ME ULTIMA ESSAY QUESTIONS

Q11. Bless Me Ultima, in both text and film, share many similarities. The storyline develops as Ultima comes to live with the Marez y Luna family during the last of her days. Antonio, the young boy, witnesses the deaths of Lupitio and Narciso causing him to face the reality that everything living is everything that dies. Throughout the book and movie, Antonio constantly struggles between choosing his mother’s wish for him to become a priest or becoming vaquero like the men on his father’s side of the family. Each of these choices were equally honorable. There is also an ongoing battle between good and evil in the village; Ultima, representing the good being, and the evil of Tenorio and his witch daughters. In the end, as in all good stories, good destroys evil and Antonio recognizes that change has brought him peace. He understands wisdom and has a better understanding of his reality. I found that there were more similarities between the book and the movie than there were differences. Although, I noticed in the movie that the Golden Carp was nonexistent compared to the written literature. In the book, the Golden Carp was God-like to Antonio where he was constantly going back and forth between the beliefs of God and the ways of the Golden Carp. Anaya states, “The orange of the golden carp appeared at the edge of the pond. As he came out of the darkness of the pond the sun caught his shiny scales and the light reflected orange and yellow and red. He swam very close to our feet. His body was round and smooth in the clear water. We watched in silence at the beauty and grandeur of the great fish" (p. 115). When Antonio sees the Golden Carp for the first time, he starts to question his own religion because Cico describes the Golden Carp as a god. However, in the movie, there was no recognizable