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Structural Patterns in The Burning Plain : A Key to Juan Rulfo's Fiction
Author(s) -
Egeland Marianne
Publication year - 1985
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.1985.tb00824.x
Subject(s) - narrative , parallels , context (archaeology) , literature , perspective (graphical) , history , focus (optics) , narrative structure , key (lock) , linguistics , art , philosophy , archaeology , visual arts , computer science , mechanical engineering , physics , optics , engineering , computer security
“The Burning Plain” is the title story of the Mexican author Juan Rulfo's only collection of short stories ( El llano en llamas ). Through analyses of its structural patterns the rest of Rulfo's small production, i.e. the novel Pedro Paramo , is discussed, as well as the author's position within both the Mexican and the wider Latin‐American tradition. First the measurable categories of “The Burning Plain” are studied: formal, temporal and linguistic structures such as construction, division in parts, language, mode and focus of narration, repetitions, chronology, singulative, iterative and durative narration. Then the interest is shifted to the great lot of oppositions, parallels and paradeigmata the whole story is founded upon. After the similarities and differences have been demonstrated and checked, they are looked at within a larger perspective and interpreted within the whole context of the story. The thematic structures are treated in the last part of the article: what the story's chiasmic structure, the different leitmotifs, all the conditional comparative clauses, etc. signifiy thematically; how both form and content contribute in the portraying of a static, sterile and inhuman pseudo‐world, but at the same time contain ambiguous and contradictory elements.