This week’s reading was Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, a relatively short novel about a man visiting his parents’ hometown in search for his father, the eponymous Pedro Páramo. The setting is the town of Comala in early-20th century Mexico (some of the flashbacks creep into the Mexican Revolution), but the narrator Juan Preciado is implied to return much later than the events composing the majority of the novel as he approaches a town no longer inhabited by the characters featured in the story. “Inhabited” by no living humans, but still populated by the presence of dead former residents that come to haunt Preciado to his death. Comala is a literal ghost town.

I found the concept of this novel to be exceedingly interesting, and not like any other I’ve ever come across before. All of the characters are dead! And their stories are not told retrospectively, but usually by the ghost of the characters themselves. This being a literature course, of course I am tempted to think of why the author chose to employ this technique: in other words, what does the death of all the characters add to the text? I think Rulfo is making a commentary on legacy. The concept of legacy is not really detached from the concept of “ghosts”. When we talk about a dead person, we imagine them making a tangible impact on the present. The supernatural connotation of ghosts is derived from the idea that they can interact with us presently. In Pedro Páramo, Juan Preciado joins the dead of Comala fairly early and thus only briefly interacts with the ghostly inhabitants of the town as a living individual.

Like the previous week’s reading, Pedro Páramo refuses to have a linear storyline. The storylines blend together in a way which makes it impossible to establish chronology. My approach to “confusing” stories like these is to just approach it head-on: I get what I get, I’m sure I’ll be able to figure it out later- even if I’m not, perhaps that is the desired effect. Did I understand 100% of this novel? Probably not, but I am not convinced that Rulfo was trying to create the most straight-forward narrative either. Pedro Páramo is about the fine line between life and death, two statuses that may not be in direct opposition to one another. People can live, even in death, through their legacies. What happens when their legacy is erased? When the memory of a person is forgotten? Is that what it means to be truly dead?

There are  ghost towns like Comala everywhere: small, rural towns that are usually only populated by elderly people who live on the memory of a thriving local past. My question for the week is: have you been to a ghost town yourself? What are the similarities between the real town you visited and the fictional town of Comala? Do you think either town will have an enduring legacy?