Writers often highlight the values of a culture or a society by using characters who are alienated from that culture or society because of gender, race, class, or creed. In “Hostage” and “Straw in to Gold: The Metamorphosis of the everyday”, Bruno Sokolov and Sandra Cisneros were both alienated by their society and culture. They seemed and behaved different from others when they were kids; they had been ignored, laughed at, or even feared of by the society. Bruno Sokolov was a fourteen –year-old kid in middle school, but his appearance seemed like an unnervingly adult. He dressed strangely, and has a scar on his forehead. “His ide shoulders, sturdy neck, dark oily hair wetted and combed sleekly back from his forehead like a rooster’s crest, above all his large head and the shrewd squint of his pebble-colored eyes game him an air unnervingly adult, as if, in junior high school, in the company of children, he was in disguise, yet carelessly in disguise”(1201). People were feared to approach Bruno, because of his physique, which people found threatening and scary. He could hardly make friends with his contemporaries and integrate into the school’s environment, and even many teachers were scared of him. Bruno was the leader of a neighborhood gang and had remarkable self-confidence; he also ran for the ninth grade presidency election. “He spoke English with a strong accent, musical, yet mocking, as if these sounds were his own invention, these queer eliding vowels and diphthongs, and he had remarkable self-confidence for a by with his back ground, the son of Polish-Russian our ninth-grade presidency, in a fluke of an election that pitted our teachers’ choice, a ‘good’ boy, against a boy whom most of the teachers mistrusted, or feared” (1201). Although the kids were waiting to see Bruno’s joke, because they thought he wasn’t competent for the president. Bruno spoke liked a politician and his speech was really well. He made his schoolmates felt proud of him. In the story, Bruno saved the narrator from being assaulted by an assailant in the public library, but people didn’t treat him as a hero after his