Pedro Parámo by Juan Ranulfo

In A Place Where the Sea Remembers, Sandra Benitez invites us into a mesmerizing world filled with love, anger, tragedy and hope. This rich and bewitching story is a bittersweet portrait of the people in Santiago, a Mexican village by the sea. Each character faces a conflict that affects the course of his or her life. The characters in this conflict are Remedios, la curandera of the small town who listens to people’s stories and gives them advice, Marta, a 16 year old teenage girl, who was raped and became pregnant. Chayo is Marta’s big sister and Calendario is Chayo’s husband. Justo Flores, his conflict is person vs. self. One of the most important conflicts in this story is person vs. person, then person vs. supernatural followed by

In Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the concept of appearance versus reality is manifested in three of the major characters around whom the novel revolves. The surface impressions of Santiago Nasar, Angela Vicario, and Bayardo San Roman are deeply rooted in Latin culture; underneath the layer of tradition, however, lies a host of paradoxical traits which indicate the true complexity of human nature.

Of the many literary devices used by writers to make their work more powerful and layered, symbolism is one of the most effective, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a text that relies heavily on its use to develop its narrative. The novella recounts, in the form of a pseudo-journalistic reconstruction, the murder of Santiago Nasar in a small Colombian town in the mid 1900’s. Through the course of the novel, Marquez employs various symbols to reinforce key ideas, themes and techniques. This helps the novella break the monotony of a linear storyline and unfolds the plot in a unique way that compounds both effect and meaning.

His most perfect love in all the world was on that train. So he’d run to the end of the earth if he had to(Pg. 120). Juan Villasenor, one of the two major characters in Rain of Gold, a nonfiction novel by Victor Villasenor, faces many problems throughout the book that have a significant impact on the skullduggery little boy we knew from the beginning to the scrupulous and surreptitious man at the end. In Rain of Gold, it follows the sides of 2 characters, Juan, Lupe, and their families during the time of the Mexican Revolution, as they travel from Mexico to America, and go through many struggles on this voyage. In these obstacles, Juan faces from beginning to end, he learns many things on this journey and meets new people that change his

The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela is arguably the most important novel of the Mexican Revolution because of how it profoundly captures the atmosphere and intricacies of the occasion. Although the immediate subject of the novel is Demetrio Macias - a peasant supporter of the Mexican Revolution -, one of its extensive themes is the ambivalence surrounding the revolution in reality as seen from a broader perspective. Although often poetically revered as a ‘beautiful’ revolution, scenes throughout the novel paint the lack of overall benevolence even among the protagonist revolutionaries during the tumultuous days of the revolution. This paper will analyze certain brash characteristics of the venerated revolution as represented by Azuela’s

In her essay “Nine Days of Ruth,” Angela Morales eloquently yet humorously narrates the final nine days of her grandmother’s life. Initially, Morales reminisces about the day her grandmother Ruth passed away projecting a gothic, murky and vacant atmosphere. However, Morales shifts from a leaden tone to a more gratifying voice revealing her grandmother’s life trajectory: betrayal, death, and struggles. The author ends with a eulogy expressing to her grandmother that while other will bury with a different image or perspective in mind, she will bury her as a luminary. Make-believe, fantasy, and imagination play an important role in the essay because it conveys the beauty of death.

Characters are made to present certain ideas that the author believes in. In Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold there are many characters included that range from bold, boisterous characters to minuscule, quiet characters but one thing they all have in common is that they all represent ideas. Characters in the novel convey aspects of Marquez’s Colombian culture.

Knowledge is the information in which we perceive to be the truth of the world around us. However, all knowledge is susceptible to change depending of the bias of the character. Gabriel García Márquez demonstrates this issue in the novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold by exploiting the understanding of knowledge through fabula and syuzhet.

In the novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez symbols are used throughout the plot to develop characterization, foreshadowing and irony. Two of the most important symbols are weather and dreams. Weather is used to develop the perspective of the

Pedro Paramo is a novel that cannot be fully understood without consideration of its rich cultural background. It is this Mexican background, which informs so much of the novel, providing the main conflict. The narrator of the tale remarks “some villages have the smell of misfortune” while describing the locale of Pedro Parámo, the small Mexican town of Comala where the story plays out on many levels (83). On the surface level, this story is merely about a tyranical man who ruins his hometown of Comala. But in reality he does much more than that, his presence detroys the town completely, driving everyone out and converting the town to a type of purgatory. This deeper harm that he causes, by damning the rest of his townsmen is the evil

Half of the people of Macondo consider the weight of memory a burden, while the rest cannot recall the past; half binding it’s prey to the past, and half imprisoning them in the present, but both never able to see a future. The character Rebeca represents those who believed memory was a burden. After her husband's death, “Rebeca closed the doors of her house and buried

As kids, and onto primary schooling, we were always taught how to follow a story, beginning, middle and end. A plot that any five year old could follow and not have to ask questions. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, would make that same five year old want to cry of confusion and not just because it has a gruesome ending. Marquez’s novel explores the death of a man, but with his elaborate nonlinear plot style, we are dropped into a puzzle, confined by one person’s narration, and a story that does not have a traditional beginning, middle, or end. The style presents the reader with much to think about while reading the maze of a nonlinear story, and has them piece together the theme that community means nothing when diffusion of responsibility takes hold.

There are many sides to every story. While neither is necessarily wrong, it is understood that in reality there is only one story viewed in two different ways. However, magical realism is the exception to this. In “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”, Garcia Marquez embraces magical realism to enhance the novel. While allowing the perspective of different characters to all hold truth, it also works as an extension to clarify their own perspective on daily events.

For the third summary paper, the film being summarized is Butterfly directed by José Luis Cuerda. The film takes place in Galicia (north-western Spain) in the year 1936 as the Spanish civil war is looming over the country. The film follows a boy named Moncho and his teacher Don Gregorio as they develop a close relationship with one another. The film introduces Moncho wide awake in bed while everyone else is asleep. He is excited to go to school for the first time tomorrow and is too tired to sleep because of it. Moncho is introduced as a shy, innocent boy in the beginning of the film. The teacher Don Gregorio is introduced as an innocent, kind teacher who takes Moncho under his wing to teach him about life. The major theme of the film is loss

The novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a journalistic account of a historical murder, is written by author Gabriel García Márquez. Continually through his career “Garcia Marquez employs journalistic writing techniques in his fiction, and particularly in Chronicle of a Death Foretold in order to produce a seemingly more authentic and credible work”( Gardener 3-4). This particular novel reads as if it is fictional. However, readers are interested to know that the account is based on a factual event. It is based on an event involving some of the authors closest friends thirty years before the novel’s date of publication. It is believed to be “A perfect integration of literature and journalism”(Gardener 1). Marquez tells readers he uses