This book is tough. The title makes me feel like there will be fascinating adventures, but there are not. The diction is hard to understand as an outsider, hehehe.
Another reason this book is difficult to read is that I found the narrator to be less vividly portrayed compared to the books we read before. As someone who always tries to focus on the protagonist and the plot, this book made it a bit hard for me to follow. In the lecture, it is argued that he “is never at home” and is always an outsider, which may be the reason the book feels this way.
I found that the narrator behaves indifferently toward the things around him, which allows me to think more about the incidents that happen in the book and the other characters. At the beginning of the book, when he and his father are at the Old Man’s house, most of the conversations are depicted between his father and Pongo. The narrator is always the one who shares his feelings but never participates in the conversations (7).
When it comes to the later part of the book, where he is enrolled as a boarder at a Church-run boys’ school, the author spends a great amount of words describing the boys playing with the zumbayllu. He is definitely not welcomed by the boys, though I cannot see the exact reason. When he successfully throws the zumbayllu, the boys shout, “This game’s not for just any old stranger!” However, I still find him behaving indifferently. In the descriptions of his feelings and actions, he never seems to feel bad about this.
The part where I feel he starts to assert something is in Chapter 11, when the narrator confesses that he “could not understand how many of the beautiful young ladies” could weep for the soldiers. The soldiers are the ones he “was suspicious of.” He thinks of the “humble gendarmes” and the fat majors, then questions the clothes and boots they are wearing, finally bringing it back to the weeping young ladies. I think he is thinking conspiratorially, believing that the soldiers may have done something to the women. The narrator also reveals his feelings toward the soldiers to Palacitos by saying, “They’re just like me! Not them!” and asking, “What are soldiers good for?” (194).
The question I have is: what does Ernesto’s hatred toward the soldiers represent? And how does this relate the the deep rivers?