. The ideal house in Cisneross The House on Mango Street provides the conditions that enable its occupant to live a good life.  What characterizes that life, and in what ways does the house make it possible?  Before you draft the essay, answer the following sub-questions below for yourself.  (a.) What features of the houses mentioned in The House on Mango Street (3-5), Bums in the Attic (86-87), and Linoleum Roses (101-102) clarify what Esperanzas ideal house should not include? (b.) In Linoleum Roses, Esperanza says that she thinks that Sally married and moved into her house as an escape (101).  In the last paragraph of Sally (83) and in A House of My Own (108), how are freedom and safety related?  In what way does freedom differ from an escape?  (c.) In Alicia and I Talking on Ednas Steps (106-107) and Bums in the Attic (86-87), how are freedom and responsibility related?  (d). In the Introduction, Cisneros describes her house and new office.  In what ways do her house and office fulfill Esperanzas requirements for an ideal house?  Are there any ways it does not?

In The Sympathizer, the narrator, flying away from America toward Viet Nam, speaks of that omnipresent American narcotic, optimism, the unending flow of which poured through the American mind continuously, whitewashing the graffiti of despair, rage, hatred, and nihilism scrawled there nightly by the black hoodlums of the unconscious.  (247) 

In an essay of no more than 1200 words, approach this quote from a perspective informed by BOTH James Baldwins The Fire Next Time and Rachel Carsons Silent Spring. In constructing your argument, consider what these authors have to say about what it meant to be American during the mid-twentieth century. What did it mean to embrace a culture of optimism and prosperity and yet grapple with the possibility of atomic (and chemical) extermination? What did it mean for nonwhite Americans to navigate an optimistic and relatively affluent society that nevertheless remained wedded to its internal systems of privilege?

You may engage one author principally and another in a more secondary fashion, but you must connect the three texts (Silent Spring, The Fire Next Time, and The Sympathizer) in your response to the prompt.