The Family Of Pascual Duarte Analysis

The Family of Pascual Duarte: Camilo Jose Cela

Descriptive Statement:

The Family of Pascual Duarte by Camilo Jose Cela takes place in rural Spain from the late 1800s until about 1937. The story, told from the title character’s point of view, recounts the harsh reality of life for the impoverished, rural, Spanish family. The reader knows from the transcriber’s note, that this story was a supposed document of repentance that Pascual Duarte had written from his prison cell. Pascual reflects on his home life, living with a cruel father who does illegal things to make money, an alcoholic, promiscuous, and abusive mother, and a sister who becomes a prostitute as a way to escape their family. His story demonstrates hopeless situations that go from

bad to worse. The birth of his half-brother, Mario, a malformed, special needs child happens at the same time Pascual’s father is locked in a wardrobe and dying from a rabid dog bite. After his father dies, Pascual’s mother spends time with Mario’s father, Rafael. They are horrible to Mario and their neglect causes him to have most of his face and ear eaten off by pigs before his parents drowned him in a container of oil at the age of seven.
After finding his brother dead, Pascual is never the same.

His anger for the world around him grows and he starts out small, raping Lola, who would become his wife, on the burial spot of Mario. Things escalate after that and Pascual gets into a knife fight at the tavern, causing him to kill a man. This happens the same day that his Lola miscarried their child because she was bucked off of their horse. Pascual kills the horse, too. It is almost as if he feels the need to kill animals or people as a way of righting the wrongs that had taken place. The plot of this story centers around Pascual as he tries to live an ordinary life (get married, have children, live happily ever after), but he is too plagued by circumstance to overcome the horrible upbringing that made him into the man he was. He spends time in prison multiple times in the novel, the first for killing a man during the knife fight and once at the end for killing his mother. She was an abusive and brutal woman and one of the biggest influences in Pascual’s downfall. She encouraged his first wife, Lola, to pimp herself out to El Estirao while Pascual was in prison. This leads to Pascual killing his wife and El Estirao and eventually his mother in a brutal stabbing. Pascual is not portrayed as just a man with a tendency toward murder, he cared for his siblings and for his wives, and he did not act without a conscience—he uses violence as a means of correcting the mistakes of those that surround

him.

Interpretive Study:
The Family of Pascual Duarte is more than just a novel about an ordinary family. Indeed, Pascual does tell the tale of his family’s life together, but this story is more about a man who is maybe a little more broken than most, but still hoping for the chance to have a “normal” life. The two biggest themes in this novel are the instability of the world around them, and the amoral vengeance that Pascual feels he must act out. For this study, I have chosen to look into Cela’s coined writing style of tremendismo. This “stark narrative” is a literary technique that was developed in Spanish novels of the 1940s, starting with Cela. Tremendismo is characterized by a severe presentation of the plot including plenty of violent scenes, harsh treatment of the characters, and in the horrible but beautiful language. This style responds to complex experiences with the background of the postwar period. The Family of Pascual Duarte depicts multiple murders and crimes of shocking violence, and an array of mental and sexual issues (including alcoholism, prostitution, and infidelity).
Evaluate Statement:
This novel is most often compared to The Stranger by Albert Camus.

The protagonist in that novel, Meursault, is also telling his story of how he ended up in prison. The structure of the novels, introducing a present self, then flashing back to tell the secrets of the past, is arranged similarly in both novels. Both books were published around the same time and are both confessions from prisoners on death row. The main difference between these two novels is that Meursault always seemed so detached from his life. He was sort of making the motions and in the end, killed just because he was asked to. Pascual is way more emotional because he kills out of reaction to his emotions. His violence and anger is the only form of relief Pascual gets out of his doomed life. He is similar to Meursault because he shares that same indifference to life, where nothing would change his fate of being condemned to suffer and then die. The similarities in The Stranger and The Family of Pascual Duarte teach us that the characters, along with people, are complicated and they can see the world differently. This is intriguing for readers because the mind of the antihero can lead to interesting events. The Family of Pascual Duarte suggests that each member of their small society shares the responsibility for the crimes committed by one person in that world. People tend to be products of the world they were raised in, and can only hold so much responsibility for their acts. Pascual was responsible for

the carrying out of murder on numerous people, but those people were responsible for the way they abused and neglected Pascual until he couldn’t recognize right or wrong.