Patriarchy In Trueba's Truth

Sheffield proposes that Alba’s mixing of first and third person is actually a technique called “the objective/subjective position" (34). Whereas Esteban’s approach is what Sheffield terms “capitalistic appropriation/ownership of the story" (consistently subjective and biased), Alba avoids this appropriation of the family’s history by admitting that her information comes from other sources, such as Clara’s notebooks that bear witness to life. Her account is more like a cooperative documentary than a first-person account, and this “subjective/objective position" not only lends her credibility but, even more importantly, “allows for the deeply personal accounts of individual people, memories, and stories in the novel while preventing the appearance of personal bias" (Sheffield 34). Flora Schiminovich recognizes Esteban’s patriarchal narration and character, arguing that "Trueba’s ‘truth’ is the ideology of patriarchy, capitalism, dominance, and politically dictated history and memory; he only begins to realize it is a falsehood after his granddaughter, Alba, returns from the government torture camp and tells her story" (35). Schiminovich’s including of the torture camp in Esteban’s transformation leads to another reason for dual narrators: Esteban is,
Earle argues that "[t]he dramatic nucleus of the book is the struggle between Trueba and the forces he generates, on the one hand, and the female members of his family, on the other"(550).To Earle, Esteban Trueba "is the blind force of history" along with all of "its aggressive, vigorous, physical manifestations" (Earle 550). In other words, Esteban and his controlling political party create one history, while Alba and her female ancestors fight against this aggressive dominance with their own substitute