Reflecting on my experience with this week’s reading, Juan Rulfo’s “Pedro Páramo,” I can only describe it as challenging. Despite my initial excitement to delve into what I expected to be a concise narrative at an overview, seeing that it lacked traditional chapter breaks and was fairly short, I soon discovered it would be yet another new reading experience. Overall, I found it pretty difficult and confusing for a number of reasons. Rulfo’s series of fragmented memories and non-linear narrative is hard to follow. At times, I found it difficult to understand what was taking place in the realm of reality and what was taking place in this other fantasy realm filled with ghosts. Another reason is the disorienting narration style. The jumping around between past and present, 3rd person and 1st person, frequent shifting between various living and dead characters’ points of view made it difficult to keep track of who was speaking and, at times, follow along with their stories and place in the timeline of the novel.
During the lecture, Professor Beasley-Murray mentioned that “Comala is the site of a permanent afterlife, of tales that continue to be told long after their tellers are dead (but not gone).” I think this speaks to the question brought up during the discussion about what the text is telling us about life, death, and the relationship between them. Like Comala, the people that comprise it have maintained a kind of permanence in its site. In the text, Rulfo explores the idea that death is not the end of existence, but that life and death are interconnected. He does this by telling stories through the perspective of ghosts that appear in an in-between state of life and death, suggesting that death is not the end, but rather a continuation of life. The way the story is told also blurs the line between past and present and between what is alive and dead, showing that life and death are not always separate; they can be connected in different ways.
Despite reading the novel in its entirety and doing additional research, I’m still not really sure what I’m supposed to take away from it. So, my question for discussion is: What is your interpretation of the themes and messages in “Pedro Páramo”? What do you think the author is trying to convey about the human experience when it comes to life and death?