The child lens that Arias adopts in this short story made me reflect a lot on the innocence of children and their way of thinking. I compared the text a lot to Room, which is a novel about a kidnapped mother and her son. Here too the five-year-old child is the one that narrates the very tough journey the two take to escape the mother’s kidnapper. It is through the view of a child that an author is able to “dumb down” a tough narrative and see it through a different set of eyes who are also trying to comprehend it. Not only are we learning along with the protagonists, but we get to see a different perspective on what they think of it.

The start of the text seems to be the most impactful in this sense, as it is where we first meet Maximo and his way of thinking. Although it’s told from a 3rd person’s perspective, we still get an insight into his thoughts, such as when he talks about the “poor little corpses” “filled with worms” who “deserved to die” (Arias 50). If an adult character were to say that these poor little corpses deserved to die, we would probably characterize them as a violent person with psycopathic tendencies. However, the context of this character allows for the reader to somewhat understand them and their thought-process. It’s not necessarily because Maximo wants them to be dead, but instead he feels like they deserve it because of their bad smell. It seems like a simple answer to the situation for Maximo, but as readers it allows us to reflect on what this character is surrounded by, and what his perception of death is in his war-filled upbringing.