Coming of Age
"Eleven" is a coming-of-age story and also an anti-coming-of-age story. That may seem a bit paradoxical, true, but sometimes you've just got to keep calm and love the paradox.
Rachel's is a coming-of-age story because it tells about a time in her life where she learned something about herself and the world. Unlike a typical rendition of the genre, Rachel doesn't start out as a child and end her story with something like, "And then I became and adult and life was peachy." The story is only twenty-two paragraphs long, after all.
Yet Rachel does go from being a child to a slightly more mature child, and even if she can't completely process it, she has taken steps toward adulthood by learning important lessons about the so-called real world. She has started "growing up."
On the other hand, "Eleven" is an anti-coming-of-age story, too, one that challenges the genre and questions whether one ever truly "comes of age." Traditionally the genre centers on moving from one stage in life (childhood) to another stage of life (adulthood) as though the two are exclusive life phases.
But in Cisneros short story, there is no clean break between one life stage and another, no distinct boundary between childhood and adulthood. As Rachel points out:
You open your eyes and everything's just like yesterday, only it's today. And you don't feel eleven at all. You feel like you're still ten. And you are—underneath the year that makes you eleven (1).
In "Eleven," Rachel has grown up a bit, but she never makes a clean break from where she started. She will always be ten years old and three years old—at the same time as being eleven years old. Based on Rachel's worldview, this remains so forever. When her mother cries, it's not an adult that is crying, but the three-year old part of an adult. We can assume that even when Rachel is twenty-two she'll still carry within her an embarrassed eleven year old, too.
Rachel never transfers from one part of life to another. Instead, her ages become layers inside you like "rings inside a tree trunk" (3). She never comes of age but is always becoming new ages.