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Paco's Life

Decent Essays

Everyone wants adventure in life, so much so that people can become careless and, in some cases, be forced to suffer the consequences from it. This is evident in the short story, The Capital of the World by Ernest Hemingway. Paco is a young boy who works at a hotel which is home to six bullfighters. To Paco, these are the only people who “exist” in the hotel due to his infatuation and romance with the art of bullfighting. However, his passion for such a dangerous sport will end up catching up to him in the end when his co-worker, Enrique, shows him that the there is more to bullfighting than what meets the eye. Hemingway’s reveals his own life though the setting, characterization of the protagonists, as well as theme.
For example, The Capital of the World takes place in a hotel called the Luarca, in Madrid, Spain. Paco, the main character, loves the place he lives and describes it as, “unbelievable place” (para 2). The hotel is home to …show more content…

The central theme of this story would be curiosity got the cat. All of Paco’s life he had been fascinated by the idea of bullfighting, but he never truly thought about the dangers the sport had to offer. The dishwasher suggested that he and Paco pretend to fight a bull by attaching sharp knives to represent the horns of a bull to a chair and have him chase after Paco. The first run went fine, but it was on the second run that they author says, “…he stepped his left foot two inches too far forward and the knife did not pass, but had slipped in as easily as into as into a wineskin and there was a scalding rush above and around the sudden inner rigidity of steel…” (para ). The knife had entered his lower abdomen. “All I wanted was to show the danger,” Enrique said in paragraph … While he was gone, Paco had died. Due to his curiosity and love for a sport that was far too dangerous for him, he lost his life trying to live in the moment that the people he looked up to

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