A Study Guide for Octavio Paz's "My Life with the Wave"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Octavio Paz's "My Life with the Wave," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535829212

Book preview

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My Life with the Wave

Octavio Paz

1951

Introduction

Octavio Paz, Mexico’s foremost poet of the twentieth century after World War II, was awarded the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature. My Life with the Wave, a surrealist prose poem, first appeared in his collection ¿Águila o sol? (translated as Eagle or Sun?) in 1951.

In My Life with the Wave, a man, while at the beach, is seduced by an ocean wave, which insists on following him home to Mexico City. The man and the wave have a passionate, turbulent, love affair, in which the wave is both adoring and demanding. Because she is lonely, he brings her a school of fish to swim in her waters; but, when he becomes enraged with jealousy of her attentions to the fish, he tries to attack them, and the wave nearly drowns him. After that, his love for the wave turns to fear and hate. To get away from her, he leaves home for a month. When he returns, he finds that the winter weather has turned the wave into a statue of ice. With cold malice, he sells the frozen wave to a friend of his, a waiter at a restaurant, who chops the ice into small pieces to be used for cooling