Viajero Analysis

With the power invested upon it, literature reflects norms and values, revealing the ethos of one’s culture, the pains and pangs of history, the bloodshed preserved in books, the processes of political and class struggles, social facts, the beauty of the people but more than that, the beauty of their stories. As it mirrors human actions, it often presents a picture of what people think, say and do in the society or what society as a whole does in shaping the values of its people. Hence, the writer of a particular piece of literature is experiencing the culture, living in it, breathing with it. In this light, any student of a literature class is considered lucky to have tasted a slice of life from varied places without having to spend a plane ticket – a journey inscribed in pages. And right now, another passport is safely tucked in my palm. Like the persona in this novel and the title itself, with keen eyes, brave heart and the soul of a wanderer, I am going to enter a secluded place where truths remain frozen in history books and pains of long ago keep its inhabitants forever chained in agony. This line taken from the advertisement of Asia’s Songbird Regine Velasquez’s Magic Sing would be the best starting point of this paper, “Tara na, byahe tayo ng ating makita ang ganda ng Pilipinas.” ­This is a content analysis of the novel, Viajero by F. Sionil Jose.
This paper will analyze the novel Viajero through a postcolonial perspective. As a theoretical approach, postcolonialism asks the readers to view the literary text from the eyes of the ‘colonized’, ‘abused’, and ‘marginalized’ group of people. Using Fidel Acosta’s definition, “Postcolonialism is a cultural, intellectual, political, and literary movement of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries characterized by the representation and analysis of the historical experiences and subjectivities of the victims, individuals and nations, of colonial power. Postcolonialism is marked by its resistance to colonialism and