Juan Rulfo Short Fiction Analysis
Juan Rulfo’s international reputation rests on only two slender volumes published in his thirties. In contrast to the novel of the Mexican Revolution, with its descriptive realism and nationalism, Rulfo introduced the new Mexican narrative that would lead to what has been called the boom in Latin American literature, an outpouring of innovative fiction. Colombian novelist and Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez claimed Rulfo as one of his greatest influences. The Mexican poet and Nobel winner Octavio Paz praised Rulfo as “the only Mexican novelist to have provided us with an image—rather than a mere description—of our physical surroundings.”
The isolation and desolation of the rural Mexican desert landscape of his stories provide a setting where human characters have as little hope or possibility as the landscape has fertility. Just as the sterility of the desert is broken only by the implied violence of snakes and buzzards, so too are Rulfo’s stories studded with vengeance and violence, death and despair. Several critics have suggested that Rulfo’s preoccupation with violence stems from the violent death of his father when he was only seven and the violent condition of a Mexico still in turmoil after a revolution that ended in 1920.
The journey, which is often a physical journey combined with a symbolic quest (inevitably doomed to failure), is the dominant theme and organizing principle in many of Rulfo’s stories. The relationship between father and son, or the absence of a father, is a recurring motif. Other recurring themes include poverty and power, such as the poor versus the government, or the poor versus the local cacique, or landowner-boss.
“Because We Are So Poor”
Like all of Rulfo’s stories, “Es que somos muy pobres” (“Because We Are So Poor”) reveals much about the lives of Mexico’s poor campesinos, or rural people. A first-person narrator, the boy in a poor family, tells his story in the present tense to an unnamed listener, which creates a sense of immediacy, as if events are unfolding along with the narrative. A series of disasters has affected this family: Aunt Jacinta just died and was buried; the rains came unexpectedly, without giving the family time to salvage any of their rye harvest, which was stacked outside to dry in the sun; and now the cow his father gave his sister Tacha for her twelfth birthday has been swept away by the newly overflowing river. Tacha is the last of three sisters. The other two “went bad” and became prostitutes. Tacha’s cow was her only hope for a better life; without her cow she has nothing to attract a man to marry her. Tacha’s dowry and the only bank account she will ever have has washed away in the floodwaters of the river. As the boy observes his sister crying, he notes that her “two little breasts bounce up and down as if suddenly they were beginning to swell, to start now on the road to ruin.” Tacha is devastated by the loss of her cow, but she does not yet understand the depth of her loss nor what seem to be the inescapable consequences of that loss. These people, like so many of Rulfo’s characters, are helpless victims of poverty and all it entails.
“Talpa”
“Talpa” combines some of Rulfo’s common themes, using the physical journey as the means to a frustrated quest. Natalia and the anonymous first-person narrator agree to take Natalia’s husband Tanilo to the religious center of Talpa so he can pray to the Virgin there for a cure for the weeping wounds on his arms and legs. Tanilo’s quest is...
(This entire section contains 1274 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
for a miracle—the miracle of renewed health. The narrator and Natalia agree to take him because they hope he will die en route.
It is a long journey on foot. Every night along the way Natalia and the narrator, who is Tanilo’s brother, steal off to make passionate love. Tanilo’s condition worsens, and he asks to go home, but the lovers push him onward, not wanting an end to their freedom from societal restrictions. They arrive at Talpa with Tanilo in serious condition. After rallying briefly to dance to the Virgin with other pilgrims, he dies, his quest for new health unsatisfied. Even though Tanilo’s death is the desired object of his brother’s quest, his brother regrets Tanilo’s passing. After burying Tanilo, Natalia and the narrator-brother make the long trip home in silence. Upon arriving home and seeing her mother, the hitherto stoic Natalia breaks down in inconsolable sobbing. The love and passion between the narrator and Natalia are forever quenched by guilt. In death Tanilo exercises more power than in life.
“Tell Them Not to Kill Me!”
Rulfo considered “¡Diles que no me maten!” (“Tell Them Not to Kill Me!”) his best story. Unlike most of Rulfo’s stories, an anonymous first-person narrator does not relate “Tell Them Not to Kill Me.” Rather, dialogue between Juvencio Nava, the sixty-year-old protagonist, and his son Justino opens the story, followed by third-person narration from Juvencio’s point of view, followed by dialogue between Juvencio and the Coronel who orders his death, and closing with a brief dialogue between Justino and the corpse of his father.
Thirty-five years ago Juvencio Nava killed Don Lupe Terreros in a dispute over livestock. Lupe refused to let Juvencio use his pastures. Juvencio cut a hole in Lupe’s fence, Lupe killed one of Juvencio’s yearlings, and Juvencio killed Lupe in a particularly violent manner, hacking him with a machete. As a result of his rash act, Juvencio loses everything: The cows he killed to save go to pay a corrupt judge; his wife leaves him; and he lives a hidden life with his son. The unnamed Coronel who captures Juvencio is Lupe’s son and determines to avenge his father’s death. Juvencio pleads for his life, saying he has already paid many times over. In an act of mercy, the Coronel instructs his men to give Juvencio plenty to drink “so the shots won’t hurt him.” Violence begets violence.
“Luvina”
“Luvina” is set in two locations and two times: in the present time of the inn where an anonymous storyteller is talking to an unknown listener and in the past Luvina of the narrator’s memory. The narrator is a teacher who went to San Juan Luvina many years ago. He explains his experience to his listener, who intends to go there. As he describes it, Luvina is a ghost town of ghostly inhabitants. There is no restaurant, no inn, and no school. It is a town full of women dressed in black, who move among the shadows like otherworldly shades. Occasionally husbands return with the winds, remaining long enough to beget another child, then disappearing again. The children leave as soon as they are able. When the teacher suggests to Luvina’s inhabitants that they move somewhere else with the help of the government, they laugh. The government only remembers Luvina when it kills one of its sons, they say, and besides, our dead “live here and we can’t leave them alone.” The narrator keeps drinking and telling his tale, saying, “I left my life there—I went to that place full of illusions and returned old and worn out.” He describes Luvina as if it were a dream, an illusion rather than a reality, but a frightful illusion, a nightmare rather than a dream. The phantasmagoric landscape takes on near-human characteristics and, along with the listener, the reader seems to be transported to purgatory.
