The Old Gringo | Essays and Criticism

  • Western-European Traditions of Philosophy and Narrative

    In the following essay she looks at Carlos Fuentes’s The Old Gringo as a critique of the Western-European traditions of philosophy and narrative.

  • The Old Gringo and the Elegiac Western

    In the following excerpt, Hall examines Fuentes’s handling of the female perspective in The Old Gringo and illustrates parallels between the novel and “elegiac Western” films “which are characterized by a quality of lament for the passing of the hero, and by extension, of the heroic age of the American West.”

  • Patricide and the Double in Carlos Fuentes’s Gringo viejo

    In the following essay, Chrzanowski analyzes Fuentes’s use of the “double” or “doppelgänger” literary device as well as the theme of patricide in El gringo viejo (The Old Gringo), and asserts that the author’s employment of both “has imbued his novel with remarkable structural coherence and has touched upon human issues which transcend history, geography, and culture.”