Javier Cercas’ “Soldiers of Salamis” was a gripping tale about the nature of ideology, truth, narrative, and the power these things can hold. Calling to mind the novel “W”, “Soldiers of Salamis” also features two distinct narratives in which the second is presented as being written by the protagonist of the first. The story surrounding our first protagonist, named Cercas for the author, describes his life as a struggling author and journalist as he finds himself enraptured by, and constantly seeking the truth of, the life of our second story’s protagonist Rafael Sanchez Mazas. Sanchez Mazas is presented, mirroring his real-world counterpart, as a man with bombastic, fervent, and ultimately destructive ideological pursuits whose writings spurred on the fascist Falange movement and led credence to the insidious insurrection of the Francoist faction during the Spanish civil war. Cercas’ account, however, is not that of a fierce soldier or general, but instead of a man whose rhetoric forces him and his country into such a violent and disorienting situation that the passionate ideologue seen at the beginning of his story is present only in name once he is subjected to the horrors of the war. Unlike the novels, The Time of the Doves, and Nada, where the horrors of the war effect our characters like the invisible radiation after a nuclear explosion, this portion of the present narrative displays the horrors of the war as if the bomb dropped directly on top of you, where Sanchez Mazas, incarcerated, dehumanized, and fated for death, is brought down to his lowest point before he miraculously escapes his capital punishment due to the actions of an at-the-time nameless soldier. From this point onward his grand ideological pursuits are replaced instead with a fervent need to survive and take back his humanity. His finding that the faction inspired by his words won the war gives him no peace either, as his ideals were bastardized all in the name of holding power. This exploration of ideology is tied in a way to the overall discussion of truth that informs the narrative. Much of the fiction of this work is based in the lives of real human beings, however it is not in an objective account of their lives but a fictionalization. While an initial appraisal here may be that this is simply lying, in a way all memories of people and things passed involves some degree of interpretation and piecing together of information. In this way, the novel comes to fully encompass, in its narrative surrounding Cercas’ construction of the story as well as in the story of Sanchez Mazas itself, the truth inherent to reconstructing history. That truth being that remembering an event past is much like a novel, there takes a bit of creativity and fanciful thinking to bring the past to life. Much like Sanchez Mazas constructs his own reality in the narrative through his writings, Cercas constructs Sanchez Mazas narrative by putting together pieces of a puzzle in which each piece is constantly shifting, creating a mosaic of the past rather than an identical photo

My question to readers is how much of Cercas’ narrative may capture the spirit of the real people he’s conjuring, especially Sanchez Mazas? What do you believe is the relationship between constructions of truth and systems of ideology?