The ending of the short story "Footnote to Youth" by José García Villa shows that life is cyclical and repeats the same patterns over and over. We see this through the example of Dodong and his son Blas.
At the beginning of the story, seventeen-year-old Dodong has asked his girlfriend Teang to marry him. He is apprehensive about telling his parents, but eventually, he does. His father's initial reaction is that Dodong is very young. He does not want to forbid his son from marrying, but there is a "strange helpless light in his father's eyes." Dodong is too preoccupied to see it, but readers can intuit that his father speaks from experience. Maybe his father married young, too, and so is apprehensive about his son's marriage.
Dodong's insistence wins his parents over, and he marries Teang. Nine months later, when they have their first child, Dodong realizes...
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that his parents were right and that he really is too young to already be a father. However, by this time, it is too late, and he and Teang soon have several more children.
One night, Dodong's oldest child, his son Blas, informs Dodong that he has proposed to his girlfriend Tona. Blas is only eighteen, and Dodong realizes that life will be hard for his young son. At the same time, though, he realizes that "youth must triumph." We see then, the cyclical nature of relationships and generations in the marriages of Dodong's father, Dodong, and finally Blas.
What is the symbolism in "Footnote to Youth"?
Youth is traditionally a symbol for all that is happy, carefree, and joyful. One's youth is supposed to be a time of bliss and liberation, when one is joyously free of all the many onerous responsibilities of adulthood.
Yet in "Footnote to Youth," youth symbolizes something completely different: a life of poverty, drudgery, and crushing burdens. What's more, it represents the often negative consequences of rash decisions and irrepressible desires. It certainly does for Dodong, who got married far too young and now wonders, not unreasonably, where his life has gone.
With his marriage under strain and with many mouths to feed, Dodong is not enjoying his youth. He wants to know why his life has not fulfilled all his dreams. Sadly, he never gets to find the answer to his question. However, it's not hard to see why his life has turned out the way it has. The flip side of all that freedom that we normally associate with youth is that it can be so easily abused. And that's what Dodong has done.
Unable to control his impulses, he got married and started a family when he was far too young. And in a classic case of the sins of the father being visited on the son, Dodong's son Blas is about to make exactly the same disastrous mistake as his old man. At the tender age of eighteen, he's going to marry Tona.