FL 380: An Archaeology of the "Boom": Modern Latin American Prose Fiction

An Outline of Artemio Cruz's Dilemmas

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The Death of Artemio Cruz

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1. The self: fragmentation
   a. Other possible selves (the other)
   b. "the traitor and the hero"
   c. malinchismo
   d. persistence
   e. chingones y chingados
   f. authenticity
   g. as a body
   h. as validated by survival
   
   
   
2. Guilt:
   a. living with the knowledge of someone else's sacrifice for one's own life
   
   
   
3. Fear of intimacy
   a. inability to enter in meaningful relationships with others
   
   
   
4. Rage:
   a. the frustration of having succeded at having everything and having failed at living truthfully
   
   
   
5. Choice: the roads not taken: the other "I"'s that we could have been but rejected
   
   
   
6. Death and memory:
   a. a second chance to make reality coincide with desire
   b. a return to innocence (the garden)
   c. a confrontation with choices -good & bad- that were made
   d. a purge of guilt, fear, frustration
   e. an epiphany of self -peace with one's own self-