Abundio Martínez (The Burro Driver) Character Analysis

Abundio is an arriero (burro or donkey driver) and illegitimate son of Pedro Páramo who appears twice in the novel, once near the very beginning and once near the very end. At the beginning, Abundio is the first person Juan Preciado meets on the way to Comala. Abundio gives him some essential background information: Comala is abandoned and “sits on the coals of the earth, at the very mouth of hell,” and Pedro Páramo has been dead for years. Eduviges Dyada later tells Juan that Abundio is deaf, but this did not appear to be the case when Juan met him. Abundio is, however, clearly dead—Juan meets Abundio’s ghost, not the man himself. At the end of the book, agonizing over the death of his beloved wife Refugio, Abundio buys alcohol from Inés and Gamaliel Villalpando. He then wanders to the Media Luna Ranch, where he begs Pedro Páramo for money for Refugio’s funeral and gets in a bloody confrontation with both Pedro and Damiana Cisneros (who’s taking care of Pedro). Abundio appears to kill both Pedro and Damiana, but there are many contradictory ways to interpret this passage—for instance, Damiana may or may not survive, and Pedro appears to die a totally unrelated death in the novel’s next and last fragment. Despite appearing very little in the novel, Abundio is an incredibly important character: he not only slays the novel’s principal villain and guides Juan into the underworld of Comala, but he also serves as a character foil for both Juan and Pedro. Like Juan, Abundio is Pedro’s illegitimate son, seeking a kind of inheritance or recognition from the father who abandoned him. After his wife’s death, Abundio kills Pedro out of despair and fury: he loves his wife so much that he cannot bear the fact that Pedro, who is incapable of genuine love, has ruined everything in Comala and denied him the means to give his wife a decent burial.