51 pages • 1 hour read
Isabel AllendeAnd of Clay Are We Created
Fiction | Short Story | YA | Published in 1989A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Character Analysis
The Narrator
The narrator, though unnamed in this short story, is Eva Luna. Eva, the titular character of Allende’s novel Eva Luna, is an orphaned storyteller who ascends from humble beginnings to a position of literary and revolutionary import in her native country. She strikes up a romantic relationship with Rolf Carlé, and in this story, she is with him when he is called in to cover the story of the mudslide. Eva proves herself singularly in-tune with Rolf’s emotional landscape, noting that the camera lens he uses to report on his assigned stories “transport[s] him to a different time from which he could watch events without actually participating in them” (Paragraph 5). Eva inhabits the role of storyteller for the duration of the narrative, as she is quite removed from the actual site of the tragedy and relays her own interpretive account of what she sees. Her distance also allows her to act as a surrogate for the expansive, anonymous audience that watches Azucena’s plight from around the world. Eva functions as a representative spectator who is, in the end, just as unable to change Azucena’s fate as the majority of the fictive onlookers who follow her story. However, Eva’s ordering of the pump for Rolf also turns her into one of the story’s active characters.
The narrator’s affection for Rolf impels her to read his compassion for Azucena as not only genuine, but also as something that heightens her love for him. Her intimacy with Rolf serves as a vehicle for her compassion for Azucena, with Eva herself admitting that she “love[s] him more than ever” when she hears him promise Azucena that he will get her out of the muck (Paragraph 9). However, the narrator’s focus on Rolf is also the truest form of intimacy that she can have with the disaster’s victims. Although Eva may sympathize with Azucena, the young girl is still technically a stranger—a person whom the narrator knows only in the context of her tragedy. By contrast, the narrator’s sustained interaction with Rolf in several different contexts allows her to see him as a whole person with depth rather than the symbol of any one moment in time. The narrator thus demonstrates the imperfection of empathy: how it is possible and even common to center oneself and the feelings of those one loves amid another’s tragedy. At the end of the narrative, though Rolf becomes emotionally withdrawn after Azucena’s death, the narrator vows to support him through processing his own trauma and Azucena’s tragedy.
Azucena
The cameras that broadcast the disaster’s aftermath capture 13-year-old Azucena’s “dark face, large desolate eyes, [and] the plastered-down tangle of her hair” (Paragraph 6); her head is the only thing part of her visible above the mud. She becomes quickly attached to Rolf, as he is one of the only consistent points of human contact she has throughout her ordeal. She tells him about her life in the village, her family, and her school—revelations that emphasize her tragedy by contouring the depth and breadth of what she has lost. As Azucena has never been outside of her village, the town in which she grew up constitutes the entirety of her world. The abrupt absence of what is familiar compounds the mental strain she is under. Nevertheless, in her association with Rolf, Azucena reveals herself to be intrepid in the sharing of her life, demonstrating a guileless innocence that simultaneously cuts through and heightens the bleakness of all that surrounds her. Azucena also proves herself to be wiser about her situation than Rolf is, as she meets his optimistic but naive declaration, “[W]e’ll get you out of here” with silence (Paragraph 9), seemingly grasping the fact of her impending death.
Azucena is the Arabic word for the lily, a flower closely associated with rebirth in Christianity. Though this invites considerations of the cycle of life and death, it also points to Azucena as a conduit for the rebirth of her family, village, and former social life. As she recalls these things aloud to Rolf, she ensures that they exist in yet another place: the mind of the journalist who attempts to save her. Ultimately, the ordinary elements of Azucena’s life pre-eruption paint her as a normal girl, proving that misfortune is indiscriminate. She dies at the end of the story, “[sinking] slowly, a flower in the mud” (Paragraph 24).
Rolf Carlé
Rolf Carlé is the middle-aged journalist who first reports on Azucena’s story. The narrator (his lover) provides our first impression of him; she says that for years, Rolf has been at the center of some of the country’s most devastating news stories, “reporting live at the scene of battles and catastrophes with awesome tenacity” (Paragraph 5). Rolf’s relentless assurances to Azucena that he will rescue her reveal that he puts just as much stock in his own heroism as the narrator does. Rolf assumes not only that he will rescue Azucena from her hazardous present, but also urge her towards a future of healing: “[...] Azucena would be transported to a hospital where she would recover rapidly, and where he could visit her and bring her gifts” (Paragraph 15). In Rolf’s view, Azucena’s wholesale extrication must also include a post-event recovery, revealing his own personal, subconscious insistence that suffering must come to an end, and that those who suffer must find eventual solace. These dual beliefs arguably worsen the shock that Rolf experiences at Azucena’s death, as the worst-case scenario he has tried so desperately to avoid materializes.
Rolf requests a pump to drain the water that surrounds Azucena, hoping that this will make it easier to remove her from the morass. He remains with the young girl throughout her ordeal and finds that her situation brings the darkest moments of his past to the fore of his mind: He recalls how the Russian soldiers who captured him during World War II made him bury the bodies of concentration camp captives who died from starvation, and how his abusive father would beat him and his younger sister. Sifting through these recollections allows him to experience a moment of catharsis, and he cries in Azucena’s presence. However, this catharsis is only partial, as Azucena’s eventual death compounds Rolf’s latent grief. As the narrator says in the piece’s denouement, he has not yet “[completed] the voyage into [himself],” and the old wounds “have yet to heal” (Paragraph 25).
Related Titles
By Isabel Allende
