Pedro Páramo's 'Bridges Made And Bridges Burned'

Colin Michael O'Malley

English IV

Mrs. Klebba

5 April 2012

Bridges Made and Bridges Burned

The novel Pedro Páramo is about a young man who loses his mother and decides

to take a journey to a ghost town called Comala to find his father, but instead dies of fear

and finds out his father is dead. A central theme that runs through Juan Rulfo’s Pedro

Páramo is the nature of hope and despair in a person’s life, which Rulfo demonstrates by

Pedro Páramo’s love for Susana, Juan Preciado’s journey to Comala for his father, and

Susana San Juan’s desire for her deceased husband.

Rulfo exhibits Pedro Páramo’s hope for a future with Susana as a sometimes-

positive nature followed by the negative nature of despair he experiences from her
Susana has now realized that her deceased husband Florencio

will never come back to life. She has suddenly lost all of her hope and is now filled with

despair and fear of what will come. She never plans on being with Pedro and worries

about what will happen to her lips since her deceased husband is the only one she wanted

kissing her lips. Pedro is thinking about Susana in his thoughts while she is sleeping:

“But what world was Susana San Juan living in? That was one of the things Pedro

Páramo would never know” (Rulfo 95). Susana might live in the normal world but does

not act like it, because she has crazy thoughts and dreams. Pedro will never know what is

going on with Susana. She is always thinking about her dead husband because she lives

in denial and is on Fantasy Island.

The novel Pedro Páramo was about a young man who lost his mother and decided

to take a journey to a ghost town called Comala to find his father, but instead died of fear

and found out his father was dead. Juan Rulfo used the concept of the nature of hope and

despair in a person’s life as a central theme for Pedro Páramo, and demonstrated it