Pedro Paramo Essay

The novel Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rulfo, presents a situation where the reader is not being told something in a straightforward, linear manner, but rather is provoked with questions from many points of view in order to bring the reader into the story. Though the novel begins with a traditional first-person narrative from the protagonist’s point of view, this frame story is soon overcome with other voices, memories, and associations that progresses into a timeless, fragmentary collection of viewpoints by the novel’s end. This development of many different points of view, rather than relying on a single narrative arc, provides an open perspective of not just one protagonist’s personal journey, but a shared experience; a collective experience in

Of when we used to fly kites”(Paramo, 12). This quotation helps to illustrate the idea of memory and associations; we don’t find out who the boy is (Pedro) until much later in the story yet we are given clues. By forcing the reader to remember details, this allows the reader to play an important role in being a part of the story; to take away from the experience not only what is written, but how it is written, and how those structural elements contribute to the experience of the text.
Juan Rulfo’s shifts in points of view often occur quickly, from one paragraph to the next, or even one sentence to the next. These variations in viewpoints are often contradictory and even unreliable, for example, Pedro’s delusional insistence that the character Susana loves him in return when she obviously loves another (Florencio) who is already dead, create a sense of uncertainty in which the reader is never certain whose story represents the “truth” of the piece. In one section, on page 83, a paragraph begins with Pedro Paramo’s voice, stating that “Some villages have the smell of misfortune. You know them after one whiff of their stagnant air, stale and thin like everything old. This is one of those villages Susana,” but by the following page (84), the narration changes to third person omniscient during a time when Pedro is already