El Llano En Llamas By Juan Rulfo Summary

This work is from Juan Rulfo’s 1950’s collection of short stories El llano en llamas, which presents scenes from life in rural Jalisco, Rulfo’s native region of Mexico. The collection has been translated by George D. Schade as The Burning Plain (1967). Many of its stories, like this one, involve family relationships in difficult situations. Rulfo himself was an orphan; his father was killed in the long years of the cristero revolts during the time of the Mexican Revolution and his mother died several years later. The theme of the search for the father, for family roots, and for personal or even national identity permeates Rulfo’s writings.

Both sons in this story, the colonel and Justino, feel a sense of family loyalty and duty. The colonel is seeking justice as well as revenge for his father’s murder. He does not attempt to face the guilty man directly, lest he feel some sense of compassion for him. Justino is hesitant, yet he tries to help his father. He seems to accept Juvencio’s admitted guilt, and he finally claims the body for burial. Although Justino had his father with him during his youth, he felt the fear of a life constantly in dread of his father’s potential capture

and death. The colonel spent most of his life without a father; he came to be overwhelmed by the desire to see his father’s murderer punished, perhaps as much to avenge his own lost childhood as to avenge his father.

Juvencio tries to avoid death almost up to the very end, as he has all of his life. However, there is a certain inevitability and fatalism in his ultimate demise. He knows that his family suffered along with him all those years, but his primary thought is for self-preservation. The reader is left to ponder the limits of rights and responsibilities, of justice and revenge, of mercy and forgiveness. The story offers a strongly evoked regional setting, vividly described, which is elevated to a broader level by the sobering consideration of deep, universal themes.

Rulfo is noted for his powerful evocation of scene, for the sense of place created in his work. He employs dialogue and popular speech to add to the realism of the social situations depicted. All five senses are invoked as the sights, sounds, smells, textures, and tastes of the landscape are described. The reader can feel the impact of the hard, rugged life of the region. Rulfo’s literary devices include some repetition, as in this story, to underscore a character’s desperate psychological state. The reader can feel Juvencio’s fear and dread as he thinks about the events leading up to his capture. The heat, the dust, the harshness of the scene are all conjured up for the reader’s imaginative consideration.

Rulfo also varies verb tenses in order to illustrate alternations between past and present, between memory and current reality; events are not revealed in a directly linear, chronological order. A character’s memory is used to portray the past, and dialogue among characters is interspersed with the protagonist’s own thoughts. Rulfo utilizes language in a disciplined, economical style. His setting often is one of intense and grinding poverty, desperation, and desolation; towns are seen to be depopulating as people seek a better life elsewhere. Sometimes only the dead are left behind, as in his novel Pedro Páramo (1955), with its use of Magical Realism (joining the possible with the imaginary). His stories, in contrast, are predominantly and truly realistic.

The theme of this short story can be found in all of our lives. Juan Rulfo captures perfectly our human flaws not only through the main character Juvencio, but also through his son Justino and the Colonel. The flaw that Rulfo focuses on, which is also the theme of the story, is the importance and desire for things that we do and do not have.

The most interesting example is that of Justino and the Colonel.

The Colonel did not have a father growing up because Juvencio killed him. He hunts down Juvencio years after his father was murdered. He is still angry for being robbed of a father figure in his life. He is willing to do anything to get revenge for what was taken from him. Although he never really knew his father his desire to revenge his death is unstoppable. On the other hand Justino grew up with a father. Yet while his father pleaded for Justino to save his life he coldly responds no. It almost seems like he could care less what happens to his father and is only worried about himself. Juan Rulfo delicately intertwines the idea that one person, Justino, does not value what another person, the Colonel, so desperately

desires.

The idea of desiring what we do not have is also displayed through Juvencio. Because Juvencio let his animals into his neighbors farm to eat his food, his neighbor killed one of his animals, and then Juvencio killed his neighbor. Juvencio blames it on Don Lupe, his neighbor, because there was a drought and he would not let his animals feed on his land. In reality he never had a right to his neighbors land or food.

We can see this principle continue to play on in the lives of many people today. Part of the economic problems of the USA is because of people creating debt that they cannot afford. Because we as humans are slow to value what we have yet fast to desire what we do not we continue to bring suffering upon ourselves just like Juvencio suffered throughout his life.