Mario Vargas Llosa: Creative Process, Major Themes, and Narrative Devices
An author’s novel writing process begins with a daydream, a kind of speculation about a character or a certain situation, something that just occasionally happens in the mind. Then, I start taking notes, chipping away at ideas. First, I create a general outline of the story, then change it completely. After that, I start to write, composing very quickly, almost without stopping, without any concern for style or repeating episodes. I think what I like is not to write and rewrite, cut, or edit. The novel ends for me when I have the impression that if I did not finish, the novel would end with me. That is, it reaches a saturation point, and then, it is complete.
Major Themes in the Author’s Work
Violence
In his first book, Heads, there are deaths with ferocity where The Younger Brother kills a character falsely charged with attempted rape, or in The Challenge, where one of the main characters consciously accepts death in a disadvantaged fight. There are murders in The City and the Dogs, such as that of the Slave. Near the beginning of his literary career, Vargas Llosa said: “Violence is a kind of fate in this world. In a country like mine, violence forms the basis of all human relationships. It is omnipresent in every moment of an individual’s life.” He observed militarized institutions, virility, machismo, and manhood as major problems of human existence (the great evils of human life).
Freedom
There are no truly free characters. Characters glide over the earth like characters in Greek tragedy.
Justice
Justice is not always possible. Those who dare to complain often succumb. In The City and the Dogs, Lieutenant Gamboa—perhaps the only pure character in the novel—by clinging to what he considers justice, learns at the end of the novel that he will have to wait several years for promotion and must conform to bear his limitations.
Class Bias
Those who are mocked, in Vargas Llosa’s terminology, are often composed of the gentry.
Military Structure
The entire military structure, in particular Peru, and all Latin America of my generation in general, has always lived very close to the military problem, has lived… perhaps it would be fairer to say, has endured.
Narrative Techniques in the Author’s Work
According to Vargas Llosa’s Letters to a Young Novelist, the main types of narrative techniques include:
The Plural Voice
Through the use of the plural voice and other techniques, the author makes us partakers of the action, as if we were responsible for what occurred.
Silent Narrative
Each time the spatial perspective of the story changes, the narrator moves from one spatial location to another. A shift occurs from a narrator-character’s perspective to that of an omniscient narrator, detached from the story, a third-person grammatical voice, also called the plural voice. In this case, the shift is in the point of view: it begins with a character’s perspective and then moves to that of an omniscient and invisible narrator, who knows all, sees all, and tells all without ever explicitly displaying or counting it. Masters of this concept of change include Flaubert and Faulkner. This shift can be a core element of a novel’s narrative. Other times, the shift is slow, sinuous, and discreet.
Chinese Boxes
This technique involves building a narrative like those objects (Chinese boxes) in which smaller, similar objects are contained in a succession that sometimes extends to the infinitesimal. Fiction is life lived, but another life, fantasizing about the materials provided, without which true life would be more sordid and impoverished.
Unspoken Details
The best stories are full of data that Hemingway scattered for the reader to fill in those blanks with assumptions and their own conjecture.
Intertwined Narratives
This technique involves uniting two or more episodes that occur in different times, spaces, or levels of reality into a single narrative whole, by the narrator’s decision to shift perspectives or mix them reciprocally. For example, A Face in the Night.