Epic Fail of Arturo Zamora | Teen Ink

Epic Fail of Arturo Zamora

February 14, 2019
By Anonymous

         In the book The Epic Fail of Arturo Zamora, Pablo Cartaya, the author, shows Arturo struggling to prevent Wilfrido, the rich guy who ends up being the main character’s enemy, from taking over the community and saving his family’s restaurant, “La Cocina de la Isla”. Wilfrido had family issues when he was younger, and ever since he got rich, he tries to change communities who’re jovial. Pablo Cartaya’s using the conflict to demonstrate the struggle between the good and bad by portraying the main character as someone who’s trying to save the neighborhood (the positive side), while the enemy’s the one who’s trying to change the community. Cartaya emphasizing the positive and negative is a moral thing because he’s trying to prove that the ethical can overcome evil, since the positive things cancel out the negative, surrendering isn’t a smart idea, although things might not go as planned, and everything could be an epic fail, but in the end it’ll all be a success.

         Cartaya’s trying to prove that any honorable deeds can overpower evil by showing the main character and the enemy’s conflict, or problem. In the end, the main character won. The neighborhood and restaurant was saved (Cartaya 232). This indicates that the “upright guy” always defeat the “careless guy”. No matter how much negativity there is in this world, the positive can always overcome that. People who’re positive, or do honorable deeds for this world, can always overcome the people who’re evil. This illustrates that good can always overpower negativity.

         Giving up, or not trying, is not the right way to go because in the book, the main character ran into many obstacles. Everything turned out to be an epic fail, the main character got rejected by his crush, the protest was a huge fail, the main character decided to confront the enemy and the crowd of people who were at the festival the enemy was holding, and he got put in the festival holding cell. After the protest, he found out that his Abuela had passed away, which made everything worse (Cartaya 160). Even though everything turned into a big flop, the main character still tries his best throughout the story, and he ends up winning the city council votes which means that the whole neighborhood and restaurant was saved. This shows that no matter how hard things are at the moment, there’s no excuse for not getting up and trying again because giving up isn’t the way to success.

         The author, Pablo Cartaya, uses conflict to explain the ethical and the unacceptable by illustrating that the positive can always overcome the evil because honorable deeds are better than negativity. Things might not go as planned, but giving up is not the answer to being successful. Wilfrido comes to this neighborhood in Miami, named Main Street, and he’s trying to change their community because the whole neighborhood is like family to each other, something he never had, which is why he’s against groups that are jovial.


The author's comments:

in class, we did a literary analysis on our book club novel.


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