The story is elemental, a haunting tale of a father's shame, a mother's love, and child's innocent belief, all
centered around the impossibly hopeful subject of a classroom play about a hero of Haitian independence and a
hot air balloon.
Realities of the young family's life (of nearly every Haitian life):
 perpetual unemployment, starvation, crushing poverty.
 Find proof of this…
Lili = HOPE
 Strong
 Resourceful
 Tries to keep family happy
 Content with what she has
 A parent's eternal desire to achieve a better life for her son through education.
 there is always generational improvement.
Guy – SHAME
 frustrated with his inability to give his family security
 ashamed of the menial work he does
 loves his family, but they only serve to remind him of him of his own failure.
 Proud of Little Guy
 sees a cycle of despair and remembers his own father as a low-income struggling man all his life.
 "I remember him as a man I would never want to be," he tells Lili.
In the hot air balloon owned by the rich son of the sugar refinery, Guy sees freedom. "Can't you see yourself up
there? Up in the clouds somewhere like some kind of bird?" he asks Lili. For him, the drudgery of life is
suspended momentarily by the miracle of flight and escape.
Guy chooses, perhaps for the first time in his life, a kind of freedom.
Yet, he pays the price.
Little Guy
 selected to star in his school play about Boukman, the slave revolutionary.
 proud to share this achievement with his parents
 innocent
 admires his parents
 extremely dedicated and gets painfully nervous about making a mistake.
 reveals his independence when he mourns Guy with a tearful recitation of the lines Guy was so proud of.
SETTING:
a poverty stricken section of Haiti.
This man had been out of work for six-months with a wife and child to feed.
hot air balloon = a reoccurring object in the story
o Guy has an intensity whenever they were in the field near the balloon.
o When his wife asked him about the balloon he always talked about how he could do it if he
really wanted.
o Lili has never seen that look in his eye.
 What does the balloon represent?
 An escape from the chance to live a life that he was never allowed to
 hope for a better tomorrow.
 For him the balloon represented a life worth living.
Comment and reflect on Guy’s actions at the end of the story. Do you think what he does is fair?
Choose one of the following quotes and explain its significance.
Note:
 setting (time) · The stories are told in various time settings, but all take place between the 1960s and the
early 1990s.

setting (place) · Most of the stories are set in either the village of Ville Rose or the capital of Port-auPrince, in Haiti. “New York Day Women,” “Caroline’s Wedding,” and the epilogue are set in New York
City.

protagonist · All the protagonists are young, poor, Haitian or Haitian-American women, namely, the
female narrator of “Children of the Sea,” Josephine, the unnamed prostitute, Marie, Lamort, Princesse,
Suzette, and Grace. The only exception is Guy in “Wall of Fire Rising.”

major conflict · The protagonists struggle against economic and political adversity, as well as the
personal obstacles of despair and self-doubt.

themes · The diversity of suffering; family as a source of posterity; the dangerous power of hope
Guy, in “A Wall of Fire Rising,” tries to defy his hopelessness by stealing a brief moment of glory, even though
he knows it must end in death.
Danticat - says “there is no universal Haitian experience because the people who suffer remain individuals”
The stories in Krik? Krak! demonstrate that everyone experiences suffering in his or her own unique way. The
characters in the collection come from diverse backgrounds and have very different experiences, but to a certain
extent, they all share the same pain. The despair of Célianne in “Children of the Sea” as she throws herself into
the ocean is felt by the male narrator of the same story when he embraces death and by Josephine when she
goes to watch her mother’s body be burned.