In “Plum Plum Pickers”, Raymond Barrio suggests that people can only be pushed around and worked to a certain limit until they just break. Raymond Barrio shows this by the tone this story is written in. He also shows this through repetition of words. Raymond Barrio shows this through the picture he creates with this story. These men are worked until exhaustion takes over, and they are pushed around and know they can't say or do anything about it, till the end when Manuel stands up for the others pickers and himself.
In “Plum Plum Pickers”, the tone is exhaustion. The workers and day is being empty. In the story, Raymond Barrio uses repetition of the word “drained”, which creates an emptying sensation. Barrio talks about how the day is out of light, how their bodies are out of energy, how their sprit is out of will. Everything is empting out. Their exhausted, they have no more energy, no more will, to do anything else. When exhausted its as though the human body is empty, it's like being to tired to do anything. This shows that humans can only work to a certain point before they’re too tired to do anything else.
In the story the author tries to show what’s going on with his words. Barrio sets his writing up in a way to separate each piece, so you look at certain words. It's much easier to understand what is being said.
The author tries to show how the protagonist feels through the story. They are over worked. When he writes, "The hot dry air. The hot dry air sucking every drop of living moisture from his brute body." Right their Manuel is working really hard and he needs water to be able to replenish him. Towards the end of the workday, the job really takes a toll on ones body. You can see this when he says, " His fingers burned. His arms flailed the innocent trees. He was slowing down. He could hardly fill his last bucket." There's only so much someone's body can take in one day. Exhaustion is clearly taking over. These workers are clearly being pushed to a breaking point.
Back to what the author is suggesting about people being pushed overboard, you can see when Manuel opens his mouth. "You promised to take nothing! " Manuel heard himself saying. It's clear Manuel knew it wasn't right for them to work till they where so tired, and have what they earned taking away from them. If it weren’t for Manuel, Roberto Morales would have taking those 2 cents away from all the workers that day. When he stuck up for everyone, you can see that he was tired of being pushed around to do all this work, and have someone come take what he earned. It's not right and Manuel knew that.
In the end this story is a good example of, people allow themselves to be kicked and kicked until that point comes when they stop the foot before being kicked again. It's all about how much you actually willing to take before you want to do something about it. People have breaking points, and limits their human its a normal thing.