Analyze and Identify the Theme in the Book Pedro Paramo

Analyze and Identify the Theme in the Book Pedro Paramo

Introduction

The fictional world of the contemporary the author Juan Rulfo Mexican author Juan Rulfo is one of reduction and denial. Character is stripped of external appearance and splintered into existential shards; plot is inconsequential or nonexistent; action decelerates into stasis. Narrative continuity is fragmented into bits of dialogue and truncated memories. Structural disintegration reflects the physical and moral dissolution of the universe. Man is reduced to a voice and sometimes to a mere echo. The most profound expression of Rulfo's nihilism is his first and only novel to date, Pedro Páramo, which depicts a nightmare of suffering founded upon the violent existence of a Mexican cacique.

Narrative devices in “El hombre,” including the rupture of chronological sequence through flashbacks and premonitions, rapid alternations in point of view, and the juxtaposition of strips of interior monologue from various consciousnesses, prefigure the intricate structural techniques of the novel. The town of Luvina with its muted, stagnant life anticipates the ghost town of Comala. In both short stories and novel the frequent use of first-person narrative underscores the solipsistic nature of Rulfo's universe. Characters are unable to sustain meaningful relationships with one another; they retreat into private worlds of revery and fantasy.

Identification and Analysis Theme in the Book

As an impotent figure—a mere congeries of psychic states—Macario foreshadows the listless form of the aged Pedro Páramo, who after the death of Susana abandons his empire, worthless to him after the person for whom he has constructed it is irrevocably lost. The once aggressive and powerful cacique now subordinates him entirely to the memory of Susana. Oblivious to external reality, he attempts to restore his lost love through the only mode now left to him—the psychic realm of memory and imagination. In their brooding passivity and suffering, the decrepit Páramo and the idiot Macario are one (Dove, 2004, 49-61). At the end of his narrative, the thoughts of the boy circle back to the lyric memory of Felipa, just as the mind of the cacique, like a needle on a broken record, obsessively reiterates the theme of Susana San Juan.

Fatalism takes many forms in Rulfo's short stories. In “Nos han dado la tierra,” it is a political force against which the campesinos are powerless. Deprived of horses and rifles, their only means of defense, they are compelled to accept the wasteland that the government has given them to cultivate (Dove, 2004, 49-61). In “Es que somos muy pobres” poverty and natural disasters like the flood that sweeps away the remnants of family livelihood make the young girl Tacha's recourse to prostitution inevitable. The genetic determinism found in “Macario” also is a factor in the sordid life of Urbano Gomez, the protagonist of “Acuérdate”: “Quizá entonces se volvió malo, o quizá ya era de nacimiento.” Heredity also plays a role at the end of “El llano en lamas,” when El Pichón, a revolutionary turned outlaw, is finally released from ...