The use of ghosts to allude to cultural and historical values in Pedro Páramo
The novel Pedro Páramo, by Juan Rulfo, is about a man named Juan Preciado who goes on a journey to discover his past. After promising his deceased mother that he will find his father, he sets on a journey to Comala. Comala is a rural town that was his mother’s hometown and is supposedly where his father is located. As he approaches Comala, he realizes that it is a ghost town because he sees no one throughout the novel except for three characters. Although there are only three characters, physically, that are present, Juan constantly hears whispers and voices. Also, most of the characters he narrates about or encounters through his journey are actually ghosts even though he does not realize it until the middle of the novel. Ghosts play the role of helping Juan discover the truth about his past and the truth about Comala. The motif of ghosts, however, has a much deeper meaning than to further the plot. The motif of ghosts rises to a symbol which serves as cultural and historical values in Pedro Páramo.
The symbol of ghosts alludes to the history and importance of the recent various wars and battles fought in Mexico at that time. Juan Rulfo’s novel was published in 1955, about three decades after the Mexican Revolution and two decades after the Cristero Revolt. These events are responsible of how Mexico was shaped and all the consequences that followed. Rulfo uses ghosts to portray the historical importance of the wars and battles by expressing that the ghosts were the locals of Comala that perished as a result of the events. During the Mexican Revolution (1910- 1920), the war was fought on the rural lands. This is because the revolution was about the peasant farmers who wanted more right from their government. As a result of the war taking place on rural areas, thousands of farms and hundreds of thousands of animals and acres of land were destroyed. Many of the ghosts that whisper to...