El Blog de Twanda

When I began reading the Cubs, I had to take a second look at the text to figure out who was speaking and when.  The sentences run into each other and speakers change in mid-sentence.  In his preface to the book, Vargas Llosa mentions that he wanted the reader to feel like he was listening to the story being told rather than feeling like he was reading it.  I think that this style of changing voices is the author’s method of creating such a feel for the reader.  Rather than setting quotes up as,  ” Cuéllar said, ‘I  . . .’” and  “His father said, ’Why don’t you . . . ‘”, Vargos Llosa runs things together as things tend to occur in everyday speech.  Rather than one all-knowing narrator, the voices of the people in the community are heard by emplotying this technique.

Vargos Llosa also includes an interesting use of pronouns in the story.  Throughout most of the text, the pronouns “we” and “they”  are used interchangeably. For example,  “They gave in to him, and we went along with him,” and “What we liked most in the world were sports and movies, and they would give anything for a soccer match.”  There is even one instance where the two pronouns are used side by side. “They we’re getting even”  The use of these two pronouns seems to reflect the voice of the group as a whole, for it is difficult to identify two separate groups with which to associate each pronoun.  The group voice consists of Cuéllar’s peers in the barrio, and possibly at times the community as a whole.   

One of the passages that stuck out to me in the Notebook is the one where Césaire cites some of the African heritage of his people (princes of Ghana, Madhis, etc.) contrasting this heritage with their present-day reality (mediocre dishwashers, etc.).  Dr. Sol’s lecture helped me see the big picture in this text.  She suggested that this was a point in which Césaire was working through which group he identified with.  In this passage, Césaire  seems to identify with the black people in his country.  In speaking of the history of the black people in this passage, he uses the pronoun “we,”  which implies that he is part of the group being described. I wonder, though, what he means by the phrase “I laugh at my former childish fantasies,” which precedes the history he cites.  Is he suggesting that as a child he fantasized about these “glory days” for the black people, in a time when they were not slaves, but proud warriors?  Were these the stories that black children acted out as they played with each other, similar to the cowboys and Indians that children used to act out in the U.S.? Or, is Césaire referring back to his fantasies of how he would return to his native land and speak for all those who could not speak for themselves? It is hard to say for sure what Césaire intended by this statement, but it could fit all three interpretations.