Arlt’s “Mad Toy”  showed the harsh realities of political corruption, urbanization and industrialization that Silvio had to face in Buenos Aires. I found myself relating to this book more than Proust’s “Combray” because of the dark humour scattered within the text. Arlt skillfully showed us how Silvio and his group of friends struggles to accept their existence and how they coped by using dark humour. I felt the scattered scenes and thoughts throughout the book added an unpredictable feature that was surprising and unsettling, but not enough for me to want to stop reading. I enjoyed the unpredictability and was excited to see what was going to happen or be said next.

Silvio did not know how to keep the chaos and the peace in his life from intertwining and I feel this stems from his love of literature and how he struggles to accept that he can’t bring in concepts from books and apply them to the real world. Arlt’s depiction of how dreams can alienate you from reality, if the world around you if rapidly changing, blurred the lined between sanity and madness.

Identity was also a large running theme in the episodes of the novel. As a teenager he formed a thieving group with his friends and he was just starting to realize how much power money and  materialistic items held. Throughout the course of his thieving, the progression of his aggression started to show with the poisoned bullets, however I feel like his aggression was forming even before this as in the very beginning of the novel he builds a cannon an refers to it as his “small monster.” Given these small references in the text I almost felt as if Silvio had an alter ego. A more violent side that he rarely showed, but it made an appearance through the tone he was talking in or like I said above, how he referred to his cannon and how it could kill people. Although I will say I think this alter ego helped him survive throughout the book and almost grounded him in reality.

What was your thoughts on Silvio’s character development and which section of the novel did you most enjoy?