Fatherlessness and Male Orphanhood: Notes on Pedro Paramo

Abstract

Pedro Páramo is a key novel in contemporary Hispanic American literature.  The beginning of the novel provides the key to the journey of the abandoned son who goes in search of the absent father; the man whose only clarity is his absence, his abandonment. It is a search transformed into a story of unresolved grief, a pain that the son will accumulate without understanding that the absence of the father is the presence of death itself.  I will focus on the exercise of interpreting the literary work from the creation and re-creation of language and themes, to continue exploring "routes of interpretation" in the sense proposed by Wolfgang Iser. I will comment on the theme of Pedro Páramo from the point of view of gender studies, particularly those of the Chilean scholar Sonia Montesinos.