Pedro Paramo

The first few pages of this novel had me captivated. I think we can immediately identify with the romanticizing of a place we have never been but only heard stories about. After his mother's death, Juan goes to fulfill his promise to her by traveling to Comala- the town of her childhood which he believes to be a beautiful place, to find his estranged father. But once he sees it over the horizon, he realizes that it is not the beautiful enchanted town his mother described but literally a ghost town in the desert haunted by its former inhabitants. Awesome. From the very beginning when the man who leads Juan to Comala replies to Juan's comment that it looks like a ghost town with, casually, yeah, everyone here is long dead... there is a feeling of eerieness.

The first two things I noticed about this novel were it's obvious element of unreality existing beside reality. In the first few pages we meet both the innkeeper who explains to Juan casually that his mother had told her that he would be arriving, and the man who directed him to her house. The innkeeper insists that the burro is dead but seems unphased by Juan's conversation with him. We are led to wonder if the innkeeper herself may be dead and just not realize it. We also get our first story about Juan's mother and Comala

Rulfo's narrative style in Pedro Paramo is very interesting and at times confusing. Juan begins the narration, but soon we hear a sort of omniscient narrator tell us about Pedro Paramo's life. There also seems to be some sort of narrative dialogue going on between Juan and some other entity. This narrative style compliments the overall sparse and fragmentary structure of the whole novel. But even as sparse as his writing style seems, we still get a very rich picture of the town of Comala and of Juan's mother and Pedro Paramo's lives. Rulfo's writing has this great gothic feel within a modernist style or structure. It reminded me of New Islands in that sense. Also in that as I read it, I was not sure what was real or what was fantasy or perception. But in Pedro Paramo, the characters are, indeed, ghosts.