Juan Preciado

Character Analysis

Mama's Boy

Juan Preciado is the main narrator of the novel, and Pedro Páramo's son. He is driven by a promise he made to his mother to go find his scuzzbag father, and to make him pay for abandoning them. The opening lines of the novel explain this motivation:

I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Páramo, lived there. It was my mother who told me. And I had promised her that after she died I would go see him. I squeezed her hands as a sign I would do it. She was near death, and I would have promised her anything. (1.1)

In fact, Juan's relationship with his mother is an important part of his character. At various points throughout his narration, his mother's voice slips in, always in italics, describing her hometown as an idyllic, beautiful land, like this: "Just as you pass the gate of Los Colimotes there's a beautiful view of a green plain tinged with the yellow of ripe corn. From there you can see Comala, turning the earth white, and lighting it at night" (2.9).

These memories are usually in stark contrast to the bleak place Juan is actually looking at. When he finally gets to Comala he is surprised by how empty it is and says "It looks so deserted, abandoned really. In fact, it looks like no one lives here at all" (2.48). The rest of the novel is about how right Juan is in his first impression—no one lives in Comala.

As Juan enters the world of Comala, he grows weak and susceptible to the craziness surrounding him:

I felt I was in a faraway world and let myself be pulled along by the current. My body, which felt weaker and weaker, surrendered completely; it had slipped its ties and anyone who wanted could have wrung me out like a rag. (5.22)

Juan also starts to doubt his sanity and even whether he's really real. People seem not to notice him, and he doesn't hear the same things they hear. At one point he can't even hear himself: "It was as if the earth existed in a vacuum. No sound: not even of my breathing or the beating of my heart. As if the very sound of consciousness had been stilled" (17.8).

But, because he owed his mommy the fulfillment of her dying wish, he feels like he has to stick it out in CreeptasticVille, er, Comala, and have a man-to-man talk with Daddy Pedro.

Scaredy Cat

He finally gets really freaked out when he's out in the street with Damiana Cisneros and she starts telling him about all the dead people who appear to her in Comala. He asks her whether she's alive… and she just disappears. Um, that's probably not a good sign of being alive, Juan. We definitely screamed at the pages, more than once, "Get out of there, Juan! Run!"

And not to toot our own horn, but he should have listened to us—he ends up being literally scared to death.

The only person in the novel who seems to actually take real notice of Juan Preciado is the naked woman he finds living in the ruined house with her brother. She watches him thrash about in his sleep, and thinks he must be an evil man because he can't sleep peacefully. Her brother thinks he "talks like a mystic" (31.12) and that he must be crazy or a con artist.

What's really going on, though, is that Juan is sick with fright. He feels like time is going backward, and feels dizzy. He begins to talk to his mother, who, even though she is dead, answers him. But even she can't see him. Since he is the only truly live person in the novel, it's pretty ironic that Juan is the hardest to see or characterize.

Juan finally dies of fright about halfway through the novel, and ends up buried in a coffin along with a woman named Dorotea. This is when he finally starts getting some answers about his father. The poor guy has to die to find out where he came from.

On the Ghostly Party Line

After dying, Juan goes back to his reason for wanting to find Pedro Páramo. In the opening lines he had said, "Little by little I began to build a world around a hope centered on the man called Pedro Páramo, the man who had been my mother's husband" (1.5). Poor dude—he went to look for his daddy with a world of hope, and what he found was a world of death.

However, Juan doesn't seem all that bummed out about being deceased. His hopes were not exactly fulfilled, but he actually seems relieved to be dead. At least he's not terrified by all the ghosts anymore, now that he is one.

Juan's final role in the novel seems to be a mediator: He listens and interprets all the ghostly talk that he hears from his casketmate, Dorotea. The undead gossip gets pretty juicy, and he finds all kinds of info about his father and his many wives and lovers.

In the end, Juan is just the dead guy with the best ears. He's passive and simply listening instead of actively taking part in the novel's plot. His character is, for the reader and for the other ghosts, a means to getting in touch with a lost past.

His quest, which was to make Pedro pay for what he'd done to Juan and his mother, is a failure. Juan ends up dead, just like Pedro. However, Juan does learn that Pedro got killed by another of his illegitimate children, which gives him a sense of vicarious justice: Even though Juan didn't knife his pops, at least his half-brother had the honor of doing so.