I found that I enjoyed reading Mariano Azeula’s novel, The Underdogs, much more than I did De la Parra’s novel, Mama Blanca, last week. The difference in pacing between the two texts was like night and day, with this week’s text having very short, condensed chapters. I also personally found the content more engaging and all of this led to make the book much more easy to digest.

This pendulum shift of pacing that I bring up speaks to some very interesting ideas that Azuela peppers throughout his text concerning the ephemerality of witnessing history in real time as well as how our various perspectives and origins greatly influence how the same events can be construed in a multitude of different ways. Throughout the text, Azuela makes various choices with regards to the formatting of his story, as well as how he compares Demtrio with Luis to highlight the messy and disjointed reality of living in a country torn apart by a many-faceted war. As Dr.Beasley-Murray spoke about in his lecture, Demetrio and Luis serve conveniently as two sides of the same revolutionary coin. That of the side of revolutionary violence (Demetrio), and the side of revolutionary intellect (Luis). This contrast highlights both of their respective skillsets but also demonstartes how neither can get very far without the abilities and assistance of the other.

As I already mentioned, chapters of Underdogs fly by, usually no more than two pages on the ebook version I read. This choice of pacing has an almost disorienting effect to it as small individual scenes take up whole chapters, causing the breaks to accenutaute their rapid-fire nature. For me, this highlighted the confusion inherent to an active battlefield, especially at the novel’s beginning when it is difficult to even ascertain who is fighting for what or for whom. This confusion heightens for both the reader and the characters in the book when Luis Cervantes somewhat arbitrarily decides defect to the Revolution’s side. Cervantes goes from being imprisoned in, and subsequently sleeping in a “pigsty” to telling Demetrio that he is an “esteemed leader” and educating the band of revolutionaries on what they “are fighting for” (49, 55, 56). Somewhat ironically, Luis’ intelligence does not seem to extend past revolutionary rhetoric and politics, as is evidenced by his total botching of the situation with Camila. This mirrors Demetrio’s inability to harness his violent tendencies for anything more revolutionary violence. Come the end of the novel, Demetrio is still the “rock” that “nothing can stop… now” (139). His sole ability to perpetuate  the violence around him does not mix well with peace time. Therefore, we can see how the strengths of both men aid their revolutionary effort but eventually fail them in the real world.

Question: this text got me thinking a lot about how famous historical events are portraryed, often with a sense of authority and solemnity. With this text in mind, are there other historical events that you think could benefit from this more disjointed and less fact-driven account of history?