STRAW PATRIOT. p1
Virginia Moreno’s Straw Patriot, A Tragedy in Five Scenes hashes over different issues such as morality, politics and culture primarily with the means of obtaining rice in the text. Tragedy is serious by nature in its theme and deals with profound problems. Classified under a tragic drama, “a character is brought to ruin or suffers extreme sorrow, especially as a consequence of a tragic flaw, moral weakness, or inability to cope with unfavorable circumstances” (http://www.answers.com/topic/tragedy). Whereas, Caciqueng Bruno, opted to face conundrums at the very beginning, made inauspicious decisions of resolving it which eventually brought him to doom at the end when he was blamed for the suicide of his goddaughter and caught by the Insurrectos.
The author, known for her native lineage, was a native of Nueva Ecija and has written a lot of similar literary pieces. Her subjects discuss mostly of agricultural matters for the reason that she grew up in a not so industrialized area. Being an argumentative writer, she’s admired to have exposed some incongruity of power and in women as implied in the context of Straw Patriot and Order for Masks (http://rizal.lib.admu.edu.ph/aliww/pmb_virginia_moreno.htm). Crucial to understanding Moreno’s construction of drama is seeing how others see it. Caws says that,
“a scene may be grasped by its own interior seer. Attention may be focused
on the central part of the scene through the eyes of an observer at the edge,
or in the center, of a picture; the reader’s seeing this observer see adds an included
frame for the reading, and clues in the sight to a privileged, if provisional, representation,
making an occasionally distorted view.” (29)
We can see Caws’ idea in action in Scene 3 of Straw Patriot when Caciqueng Bruno tries to convince his goddaughter Concha to go at Lieutenant’s place to eventually convince the lieutenant to give back the rice they have sabotaged. Concha, being helpless, found...