{"id":66,"date":"2021-09-16T13:14:15","date_gmt":"2021-09-16T20:14:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/?p=66"},"modified":"2021-09-16T13:14:15","modified_gmt":"2021-09-16T20:14:15","slug":"a-detached-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/2021\/09\/16\/a-detached-reality\/","title":{"rendered":"A detached reality"},"content":{"rendered":"

The short story \u201cGuatemala 1954 \u2013 Funeral For a Bird\u201d is an important reflection of the devastating years of the Guatemalan Revolution. Above all, this story appears to be one of loss; loss of life, innocence, family, and freedom. Arias alludes to extreme violence through the description of corpses and blood, but Maximo, our child narrator, never explicitly discusses any violent imagery creating a somber undertone and emphasizing the pervasive violence surrounding Maximo. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Maximo suffers the loss of his family, \u201cHis mother had told him that his father had disappeared\u201d (pg 50), he has no parental figure to shield him from witnessing these harsh realities. It seems that Maximo, therefore, finds comfort in rituals; his obsessiveness over naming what he sees and his dedication to providing a meaningful parting ceremony for the bird are both rituals that may be indicative of potential coping mechanisms. The death of a bird, and the effect its death has on Maximo, may be representative of all the things that Maximo has lost: his innocence, his childhood, and his family. By having a funeral for the bird Maximo may be gaining a sense of closure for these losses that he has been unable to deal with. Therefore while this story is clearly one of widespread loss, one could additionally argue that Arias tells a story of resilience and survival. Through Maximo\u2019s rituals in this story, he is given a sense of control over his otherwise devastating and harsh reality.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Maximo lists the names for several things in his reality, for example, \u201cthere were bodies all around him. These were called corpses\u201d (pg 50). It seems that by reducing such atrocities down to a single word, Maximo creates a sense of detachment from the shocking imagery he witnesses; instead of being bloody dead human bodies with identities, they are simply \u2018corpses\u2019. This seems to act as commentary on the devastating number of people who lost their lives in the Guatemalan Revolution and how their lives and identities should not be reduced down to a statistic; they all deserved to be given a ceremony like the ceremony Maximo gave the bird.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The short story \u201cGuatemala 1954 \u2013 Funeral For a Bird\u201d is an important reflection of the devastating years of the Guatemalan Revolution. Above all, this story appears to be one of loss; loss of life, innocence, family, and freedom. Arias alludes to extreme violence through the description of corpses and blood, but Maximo, our child […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86594,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-span312"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86594"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions\/70"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}