The interesting piece of this novel for me is the aspect that a female writer would intentionally tell the story of another woman through a male narrator. This choice was difficult for me to get behind because personally I didn’t appreciate the dismissive male voice that was arrogantly articulating a life and experience that wasn’t his own. However this mild annoyance I had for Rodrigo S.M kind of propelled this curiosity I had, like a need to understand why his voice was the whole novel.
A possibility I feel could be the reason for the choice is that a male voice animating a woman’s story presents foundational restrictions, there are such obvious boundaries and limitations to the narrators understanding of a woman like Macabéa. A person as ordinary as she in a world as cruel as hers, is perplexing within literature because she never stands up for herself. She isn’t an idolized protagonist and that is angering because you want so desperately for her to experience real joy not just and emulation of joy as her way of perseverance. The narrator to me sometimes feels like a stand-in or personification of hopelessness the narrator is incredibly confused by his own writing seen through the scrabbled way in which he frantically assess his own storytelling. This could be the authors way of expressing a complex of fairness within human nature. Macabéa’s life is just unfair its horrible and ugly and unfortunately the author is trying to say that’s just life. Some people just get dealt a really bad hand and this is a difficult concept for many people to understand and I think the narrator being confined by such restrictions like gender could represent this difficulty perhaps distrust in the cosmic reality, meaning of life “everything happens for a reason” ideology. Because Macabéa suffers so greatly that the pondering of “why” becomes too dense and complex to illustrate that its much simpler to describe her as too dumb, too limited to better her own life.
For this reason I feel the narrator is that emotive perspective of hopelessness because Macabéa herself is somehow in all her hardship innocent and hopeful. Like when she is told life is gonna get better she trusts that it will, if she were smart she wouldn’t be a believer she would expect the worst because that’s what life has shown her, but she isn’t “intelligent” she hears life will get better and she chooses to hold onto her optimism which is the only characteristic that makes her brave, makes her resilient.
Q: My question for this week is how everyone feels about the ending not necessarily as reader who didn’t receive a gratifying conclusion, but as a person who by reading this novel bared witness to such bitter injustice that is never amended. In her death, the theme of cruelty and injustice are solidified she’s left for dead in the gutter being passively observed and purposefully neglected by onlookers, the tragedy of it all is that she represents millions of impoverished people who are victim to their circumstance. Justice is ruined to the to the random vicissitudes of cruel fate.
Yeah, I mean I agree the ending was quite surprising to me. It was quite shocking that the car just kept on going and it seemed like people just kept walking. It’s a pretty miserable end to a miserable existence. Her existence is pretty meaningless up until she leaves the fortune teller place, and right when it looks like her life might be on the upswing, it ends. You’re absolutely right that she experiences a lot of injustices throughout the book, especially with her boyfriend Olimpico. She definitely deserved to be treated a lot better.
-Nathan Harris
“the narrator is incredibly confused by his own writing seen through the scrabbled way in which he frantically assess his own storytelling.”
Yes, writing is a burden. Even writing “simply” turns out to be difficult. And perhaps writing about a subject as apparently “simple” as Macabéa herself also turns out to be especially difficult. So he goes round about and postpones the task as long as possible… until he no longer can postpone it any longer.