Reflection Pedro Paramo

PEDRO PARAMO This novel was written by Juan Rulfo a pre eminent Mexican writer who was raised in an orphanage. The central vehicle of the novel is that spirits are here with us if we care to listen, many dialogues and situations in the book have characters who are dead and speak from the beyond. The author purposefully blends the dead with the living in an effort to place them as what they are, a continuum of each other. Mexicans and their relationship with death is a well known phenomenon where the famous old song says :Life is not worth anything. The root of this concept lies in the beliefs of the ancient Mexican Indians that professed we are all a leaf in the tree of La Ceiba where there is a place for everyone. Rulfo is able to communicate with the dead in the same manner that us readers, through the pen of Rulfo can talk to the spirits of the inhabitants of small towns in the Mexico of the times of the revolution, 1920 – 1935; where the left-overs of the feudal systems had entire townships under the control of a few all powerful men. Juan Preciado is sent to look for his father by a posthumous wish of his mother with the intent to collect his dues because he had abandoned them. The novel begins its surrealism when the first peasant Juan meets and asks for directions to his father’s town, Comala, confesses that He too is a son of Paramo, and that the old Paramo has long been dead. This should be the end of the novel if it weren’t for all the spirits and talkative dead people that are Rulfo’s characters and tell us the story of the town in a disorderly fashion, but yet one gets the picture. Many incredible characters appear, like the one of the crazy horse galloping in the night, his spirit desolated because he killed one of Paramo’s sons in a riding accident. Even the horses have spirits that converse here. As Preciado waks through the town and stays in various destitute lodgings, in the night, he can hear the whisperings of the dead people of this ghost town,