Literary Devices in Pedro Páramo
Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Setting
Where?If you thought your town was boring in the summertime, you should be glad you never got sent to Comala for summer vacation. The town where all the action of Pedro Páramo takes place is a gh...
Narrator Point of View
Two Central First Person Narrators (Juan Preciado and Pedro Páramo)It's hard to boil down the narrative technique of Pedro Páramo, which is one of the things that makes the book so freaking inter...
Genre
Pedro Páramo starts off as a clear-cut family drama: It's all about a man returning to his hometown to find his father. All of the action centers on this return, and also on the way that his fath...
Tone
Imagine, if you will, that you go back to your hometown to try to find the father that abandoned you as a baby. When you get there, the people you talk to disappear before your very eyes, and you s...
Writing Style
The narration of Pedro Páramo is all sorts of broken up. It jumps from one narrator to another, one place to another, one time to another, and back again. If you don't pay attention, it'll leave...
What's Up With the Title?
The title of the book is the name of one of the main characters (which makes it easier to remember that character's name) and also tells us a lot about what we're supposed to take away from the nov...
What's Up With the Ending?
The ending of Pedro Páramo the book is, appropriately, the end of Pedro Páramo the man. He has just been stabbed by drunk Abundio, and is staggering into the house at Media Luna. The very last l...
Tough-o-Meter
We're not going to lie: It helps that this book is a featherweight, weighing in at only 124 pages. Things get confusing in the town of Comala, and when you're battling questions like "Who's speaki...
Plot Analysis
Small Town FunJuan Preciado goes to Comala in search of his long-lost father, Pedro Páramo. We can tell things are going to get weird when most of the people seem to know things they can't possibl...
Booker's Seven Basic Plots Analysis
Our hero, Juan Preciado, never met his dad. He only knows that his name was Pedro Páramo, that he lived in Comala, and that he was a deadbeat sleazeball. His mother, on her deathbed, makes him pro...
Three-Act Plot Analysis
Juan Preciado decides to go to Comala after promising his dying mother that he would look for his father, Pedro Páramo. One of the morals of this novel seems to be that you should never, ever pr...
Trivia
Juan Rulfo wrote Pedro Páramo with funding from the Mexican government and while working as an immigration agent—what would you do in between stamping passports? (Source)Juan Rulfo published th...
Steaminess Rating
Things get hot and heavy in Comala, and while it's not exactly explicit, there are some farming metaphors that are pretty, uh, fertile.Look at this one, for instance: "And that she slept cuddled c...
Allusions
Villistas (59.2-4): These were the revolutionaries who rode with Pancho Villa in his Division of the North during the war. Carranza (65.2): Venustiano Carranza was another revolutionary and would b...