Pedro Paramo

“I felt I was in a faraway world and let myself be pulled along by the current.”

Juan enters Comala, and he immediately begins to adopt the town’s sense of hopelessness. After feeling drawn to Comala and taking the active decision to visit his mother’s hometown, he becomes lost amid the confusing atmosphere. He surrenders his agency, no longer feeling in charge of his own existence as he gives himself up to “the current” (10) that drags him along. Juan is contracting the sickness of hopelessness and surrender that has defined the recent history of Comala.

“He shot at so many targets that once in a while he was bound to hit one.”

The fortune teller tells many fortunes, but very few come true. His reputation comes only from the off-chance that one or two of his many, many predictions might happen. The man mistakes random chance for skill, deliberately mistaking chaos for meaning. This desperate search for meaning amid the chaos echoes the characters’ reliance on religion. They need to believe that their violent, traumatic lives serve a greater purpose, so they urge themselves to see signs and portents as proof of God’s existence. Every now and again, they see something that reaffirms their faith but these proofs are no more reliable than the fortune teller’s predictions.

“The day you went away I knew I would never see you again.”

Susana leaves Comala and she leaves Pedro, but she does return to the town in a physical sense. She returns after the death of her husband, however, and after many years away from Comala. In this time, Pedro idealized her in his mind. He treasured an idea of Susana that no longer bears any resemblance to the real woman. Though she might have returned in a physical sense, the emotional reality of the Susana who comes back is far removed from Pedro’s memory. The Susana who returns cannot be the same Susana who left him so many years ago; too much time has passed and too many emotions have been spent.

“And then the sobbing. Again the soft but penetrating weeping, and the grief contorting her body with pain.”

In the town of Comala, emotions are keenly felt, reflecting the depths of their trauma due to The Cyclical Nature of Violence. Sadness has a physical dimension, to the point where such an emotion contorts the body with pain and suffering. Since characters struggle to empathize with the interior worlds of others, these corporeal demonstrations of emotion are essential. Weeping, writhing, and sobbing are necessary exterior signifiers of the hidden emotional world within.

“She acted against the will of God.”

Dona Eduviges removes herself from God’s grace by dying by suicide. According to Catholic doctrine, suicide is an irredeemable sin that cannot be absolved. As demonstrated by Father Renteria’s lax attitudes toward absolving Miguel, however, the priest can at least offer her sister Maria comfort or assurance. Maria, however, lacks the financial resources to pay her way to absolution for her sister. For the poor, absolution is an impossibility. For the rich, it is just another expense. This fraught situation speaks to The Complications of Sin and Grace in the novel.

“Here I am reciting the saints as if I were counting sheep.”

Father Renteria is slowly becoming disillusioned with his role in religion. He still believes in God, but the rituals and gestures of the Catholic faith are becoming hollowed out by his own actions. After accepting bribes from Pedro and absolving Miguel’s sins, he understands his own hypocrisy. These gestures now mean nothing to him as he staggers, ashamed, through the world. The names of saints lull him toward a dreamless sleep, becoming just another meaningless ritual that he performs in his hypocritical fashion.

“They borrowed and borrowed without ever returning any of it.”

Pedro’s family has a long history of extracting wealth from the town. Before his takeover of Comala, however, they were in a weakened position. They operated within the accepted boundaries of society, by borrowing money on set terms. Even then, however, they began to transgress against social norms by failing to pay back their debts. Pedro simply takes his family’s behavior a step further, rejecting any legal claim another person might have to land. Pedro abandons any pretenses that he will ever pay back or return what he has taken, unleashing The Cyclical Nature of Violence upon the town.

“This town is filled with echoes.”

The echoes of the past are heard throughout succeeding generations, reflecting the permeance of trauma. Violence is passed down from father to child, so that the next generation inherits a terrible burden from their family. Pedro avenges his father’s death by killing an entire wedding party and then “avenges” Susana’s death by killing an entire town. Juan inherits this trauma, becoming overwhelmed by the echoed complaints of his father’s victims. The reality of his father’s violence scares him to death, meaning that he becomes an echo of Pedro’s aggression that is heard long after Pedro’s death.

“The echo of shadows.”

In Comala, Juan hears echoes everywhere. Everything in the town has become an echo, a diminishing reflection of everything that has come before. Even the shadows are echoes, in which the light that once shined on the city is duller and less illuminating than it was in the past.

“It was as if time had turned backward.”

In Comala, time does not operate according to expectation. The characters experience time as they experience death, as a seeming absolute that no longer has any meaning. Time seems to have “turned backward,” but even this description is vague and conditional, an “as if” (60) rather than a certainty because the characters can no longer rely on anything in a shifting, uncertain world. Time, like everything else, has become unpredictable.

“Those people don’t really count.”

Pedro dismisses “those people” (71) as having worthless lives as they are not able to provide any function for him. He is a transactional person, who views every individual purely on the basis of the value he can extract from them. If they have no extractable value, they barely register as people to Pedro. Since they are not people, they can be eliminated. Pedro’s callous indifference lies at the heart of the violence he unleashes.

“I’m beginning to pay. The sooner I begin, the sooner I’ll be through.”

Following Miguel’s death, Pedro reflects on his loss in a practical manner. The death is seemingly predetermined, he reasons, part of a wider campaign of punishment for his sins, which is inevitable. Pedro does not view Miguel’s death as an individual loss, but a way for God to personally punish Pedro. From this point of view, Miguel was barely a son. He was an individual component of Pedro’s campaign of war and rage against the world. For Pedro, this death is just one more transaction among many: He reasons that the “sooner [he] begin[s]” to “pay” for his misconduct, the “sooner [he’ll] be through” and can continue on as before.

“But it’s not enough to be good.”

Father Renteria is told that goodness alone is not enough. Unfortunately for Renteria, he can no longer even claim goodness. He has allowed himself and his church to be corrupted by Pedro; his attempts at passive morality are essentially an abandonment of responsibility. Renteria is told that he must actively work against Pedro and the evil he brings to Comala, a suggestion that later inspires Renteria to take up arms as part of the Mexican Revolution. This passage reflects The Complications of Sin and Grace.

“Behind him, as he left, he heard the murmuring.”

After being confronted with the reality of his sins, Renteria hears the murmuring for the first time. The murmuring is the symbolic manifestation of the sins and the guilt of Comala. The whispers creep around the edge of people’s hearing, reminding them of their transgressions. Now, even the local priest cannot escape the murmurings of sin that come to define Comala and its desolation. No one is safe from the trauma.

“Death is not to be parceled out as if it were a blessing. No one goes looking for sorrow.”

Susana speaks to Justina following the death of her mother and foreshadows her return to Comala. There, she will meet Pedro, who does indeed parcel out death “as if it were a blessing” (85). Pedro is a sadistic satire of a priest, who offers the opposite of absolution to anyone who comes into contact with him. He offers corruption and misery, rather than the grace of God. Susana will marry Pedro and then die a miserable death; her death is marked by sorrow, after Pedro has actively searched for her for so long. Pedro searches for sorrow and hands out death, embodying everything Susana warned against.

“Here there’s nothing but that sour, yellowish odor that seems to seep up from the ground.”

The town of Comala is a terrible, hellish place. The “sour, yellowish odor” (92) that seeps up from the ground builds into the idea of the town as a literal hell. The smell evokes the idea of sulfur, a chemical element that—when burned—produces a rotten stench. In literature and religion, this stench has been associated with hell. The more Pedro sins, the more he turns Comala into hell itself.

“Water kept pouring down, streaming in diluvial burbling.”

The sense of Comala as a hotbed of sin is alluded to frequently. As well as the implications of the town being like hell, the constant rains and flood harken back to the Old Testament. The story of Noah and the flood is evoked by the “diluvial burbling” (99). In Noah’s story, God sends a great flood to wash away the sins of the world. After the desolation of Comala, continuous rains seem to be flooding the town in a wasted effort to wash away the sin. The scale of sin in Comala is so biblically immense that a great flood is needed to purge Pedro’s influence.

“If only he knew what was tormenting her, what made her toss and turn in her sleeplessness until it seemed she was being torn apart inside.”

Pedro claims that he loves Susana more than anything, but he refuses to actually engage with her as a person. He knows that she lost her husband, but he cannot entertain the idea that grief might be affecting her because he never feels any such emotion. Rather than actually loving Susana and empathizing with her, he continues to love the idealized version of Susana that he has built in his mind. When she is overwhelmed by grief, he dismisses her emotions as some unknowable terror that he could never possibly understand, as to admit that she may love her dead husband would infringe on his idealized understanding of her.

“Well, because others have done the same.”

When Pedro quizzes the rebels about their motivations, they provide vague criticisms of the rich and powerful while sitting at the table of a rich and powerful man. Their motivations are hollow and vapid; they are simply perpetuating The Cyclical Nature of Violence that has produced men like Pedro and that continues to produce men like the rebels. They are violent because “others have done the same” (108) and now they are revisiting this violence on others. The cycle continues in perpetuity.

“If only she were suffering pain, and not these relentless, interminable, exhausting dreams, he could find some way to comfort her.”

Pedro refuses to examine Susana’s inner life. He refuses to entertain the idea of her as a separate human, with her own discreet motivations and emotions. Though he claims to want “to comfort her” (112), he refuses to accept the reality of her pain or the idea that she may not love him. Pedro can only deal in physical realities, so he wishes that Susana’s pain was physical. Instead, her emotional pain is distant and unknowable to him, just as Susana herself is distant and unknowable.

“Just like dead men don’t spring up from their graves.”

As the lawyer reflects bitterly on his lack of a reward from Pedro, his bitterness foreshadows the future of Comala, in which The Thin Veil Between Life and Death will become prominent. Once Pedro has destroyed the town, the dead will “spring up from their graves” (116). The streets will be filled with ghostly voices and the dead will be all that remain. The lawyer’s thought demonstrates a refusal to grasp the immensely-evil capacity of what Pedro can accomplish and the devasting effect that his actions will have on Comala.

“I’ve told you before we have to be on the side of whoever’s winning.”

Pedro tells his men to join the winning side of the war, rather than show any particular ideological bias. This instruction is telling, as the violence carries no real weight or meaning for Pedro. He fights for the sake of fighting; he sins for the sake of sinning. Everything is vapid and hollow, as meaningless a gesture as the blessing he paid the priest to provide to his dead son. Pedro does not care which side wins the war, only that he is permitted to continue his cycles of violence in the future.

“You should do what I do: put everything in the hands of Divine Providence.”

The people of Comala surrender their free will and responsibility, but cloak their surrender in religious terms. By putting “everything in the hands of Divine Providence” (125), the townspeople are refusing any responsibility for the rise of evil men like Pedro. The evil is simply the result of God’s will, so they see no need to stand up to him and risk their lives. Theirs is a different kind of hopelessness, wherein they simply give up on making the world a better place and muddle through their petty lives in the vague hope that they might reach heaven when they die. Pedro’s viciousness and ruthlessness expose the cowardice of this position.