Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Pedro Páramo, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Death, Hope, and Despair
Power and Morality
History, Memory, and Narrative
Love and Patriarchy
Summary
Analysis
Fragment 1. On her deathbed, Dolores Preciado speaks to her son, Juan. She begs him to visit Comala, Mexico—the town where his father, Pedro Páramo, lives—and claim the inheritance that Páramo has denied them. Juan, the narrator, repeatedly promises to go even though he doesn’t actually want to. But eventually, he becomes absorbed in fantasies about Comala and decides to pay it a visit.
In light of his mother’s death, Juan Preciado’s journey to Comala takes on a number of different, overlapping meanings. It becomes a way for Juan to honor his mother’s memory, take revenge on her behalf, investigate his own personal history, build a relationship with his father to symbolically mend his broken family, and secure a future for himself through the inheritance the traditional family would ordinarily promise him. Nevertheless, Juan’s sense of being caught up in visions and fantasies foreshadows both the way that all these goals turn out to be mere illusions and the way his experiences in Comala distort his sense of reality.
Themes
Fragment 2. On a sweltering August day, Juan Preciado meets a burro driver along the road to Comala. Juan notes that the “sorry-looking” town in the distance does not live up to his mother’s nostalgic stories. She always dreamed of returning to Comala but never did. Juan explains to the burro driver that he is visiting his father. The confused burro driver mentions that no outsider has come to Comala for years, but he also promises that the town’s residents will be happy to have a visitor. He asks Juan for his father’s name—Pedro Páramo—and then recalls that he met Páramo once at a crossroads a long time ago. He asked Páramo for directions to Comala and followed him there. The burro driver admits that he’s actually Pedro Páramo’s son, too.
There is already a stark mismatch between Juan’s hopes for Comala and the “sorry-looking” reality he encounters, as the town is nothing like in his mother’s stories. The place’s utter emptiness and isolation indirectly reflects Juan’s own sense of despair, abandonment, and rootlessness after his mother’s death. The Comala his mother so fondly recalled no longer exists outside of her memories, as it’s since turned into the wasteland. Pedro Páramo’s name and the novel’s title both reflect this desolateness: the name Pedro, like its English equivalent Peter, comes from the Greek for “rock,” while a paramo is a “barren wasteland.”
Themes
As they descend down the road, it gets hotter and hotter. The burro driver promises that it will be worse in Comala, which lies “at the very mouth of hell.” Juan asks about Pedro Páramo, and the burro driver calls him “living bile.” In his damp chest pocket, Juan carries an old photo of his mother that he found in her kitchen. The burro driver explains that Pedro Páramo owns everything in sight, all the way to a distant hill on the horizon called the Media Luna—but that Páramo hasn’t shared any of it with his sons. When they approach Comala, Juan asks why the town looks abandoned. The burro driver affirms that nobody lives there—not even Pedro Páramo, who died several years ago.
In placing Comala “at the very mouth of hell” and revealing that Pedro Páramo died years ago, Rulfo associates Juan’s journey into Comala with the archetypal story of a hero’s descent into with the underworld—like, for instance, the hero Odysseus’s journey into the underworld in the Odyssey, or Dante’s journey through hell in Inferno. It’s also possible that Comala represents not hell but purgatory, which is filled with purifying fire according to Catholicism. After all, it soon becomes clear that the town’s residents are waiting for spiritual redemption through others’ prayers. Further complicating Comala’s significance, one character in the novel even calls Comala her personal heaven. Rulfo also associates Comala with indigenous Mexican religious traditions, like the Aztec underworld of Mictlán. Indeed, the place name Comala derives from comal, a traditional griddle used to heat tortillas, which suggests a strong connection between the town and Mexican cultural identity. By combining Catholic and indigenous imagery about the underworld, Rulfo shows the complexity and hybridity of contemporary Mexican identity. Similarly, by depicting Pedro Páramo as a long-gone plunderer who has nevertheless left a mark on everything in sight and dispossessed the town’s people, Ruflo points out how Mexican society is fundamentally built on ruthless conquest and genocide. Juan Preciado and the burro driver represent Mexicans trying to reclaim their birthright, like so many did through revolution and political struggle in the early 20th century.
Themes
Fragment 3. It’s late afternoon, and most villages would be full of children playing outside, but Comala is so empty that Juan can hear his own footsteps echoing off the abandoned buildings. He glimpses a woman wearing a rebozo, but like a ghost, she vanishes and then reappears inside one of the houses’ empty doorways. Juan asks her where he might find doña Eduviges, and the woman points him to the house next to the bridge. The woman looks and sounds human, and even though Comala looks empty, it seems full of life. Even Juan’s own mind is teeming with life—his mother had promised that he’d be able to hear her memories speaking there. He wishes he could tell her that his trip to Comala has been a wild goose chase. He finds the house nearest the bridge and a woman invites him inside.
Like Comala itself, the ghostly woman Juan first glimpses seems to toe the line between existence and nonexistence. He sees her in the process of disappearing, so he hunts after the traces she leaves behind in an attempt to capture her voice and make sense of her. This is exactly what he’s trying to do with Comala and his mother’s memories of it: he wants to keep traces of the past alive through storytelling. It later turns out that the novel itself is doing a version of the same thing by capturing Juan’s voice, communicating Rulfo’s own memories of his childhood, and depicting a rural way of life that was beginning to disappear in early 20th century Mexico.
Themes
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Earlier, on his way out of Comala, the burro driver invites Juan to visit his home deep in the hills. He tells Juan to find doña Eduviges and says that his own name is Abundio.
The novel’s sudden jump back in time hints at the much more extreme narrative twists and turns that are to come. They are not just there for dramatic effect: Rulfo tells the story out of order because this allows him to show how Comala’s past and present commingle.
Themes
Fragment 5. Back in the present, doña Eduviges Dyada invites Juan inside her house, which initially looks empty. But Juan soon realizes that it is full of shadows and “bulky shapes.” She explains that other people have filled her house with their belongings but never returned for them. She invites Juan to sleep in an empty room in the back of the house.
Like the town, Eduviges Dyada's house seems both empty and full at the same time, and the shadows and “bulky shapes” inside seem a little otherworldly. Indeed, these things are not ordinary physical objects or people, but rather reflections of some other realms—the past and the dead.
Themes
Doña Eduviges knows Juan’s mother, Dolores. Actually, she explains, Dolores has just informed her of Juan’s visit—so recently that Eduviges has not yet had time to set out a mattress for him. Juan points out that his mother died a week ago, and doña Eduviges says that this explains Dolores’s weary voice. She remembers that, as girls, she and Dolores were best friends and promised to die together. Eduviges remembers Dolores as beautiful and lovable, and she looks forward to seeing her again—hopefully in heaven, which people can reach by dying at the right time. Eduviges apologizes for ranting but says that Juan is like her own son. Juan thinks Eduviges might be crazy, but he is too tired to care, and he falls asleep.
It seems impossible that Eduvige could know about Juan’s impending visit, somehow receive this information from Dolores herself, and not know of Dolores’s death. This highlights that, in Comala, the living and the dead are able to coexist and communicate in an unusual way. Just like Dolores Preciado’s memories of Comala barely resemble the town that Juan encounters, Eduviges has fond memories of Dolores, but Dolores seems to have forgotten about Eduviges. Perhaps this is why she remains in Comala, which is now populated by lost, forgotten souls.
Themes
Fragment 6. The novel jumps back to the distant past. Just after a rainstorm, water drips off a roof and a pomegranate tree, and then the sun comes out. A mother yells at her young son (later revealed as Pedro) for taking too long in the bathroom. He is busy thinking about flying kites with his crush, Susana, in the hills above Comala. He leaves and tells his mother that he was just thinking, but Pedro’s mother says he should make himself useful. Pedro’s grandmother needs help shelling corn.
The novel suddenly shifts to the distant past and takes the perspective of a young Pedro Páramo, the man who grows up to be Juan Preciado’s father. Because this change is not explicitly marked, it may seem confusing or random. However, the stark difference between the rainy, lush Comala of the past (the one Dolores remembers) and the arid hellscape that Juan Preciado has just encountered in the last few fragments makes it clear that this scene happens in another time.
Themes
Fragment 7. When he arrives, Pedro grandmother says that all the corn is shelled, but there is still chocolate to grind, and asks where he’s been. Pedro says he was watching the rain, but she seems to know that he was thinking about Susana, who is in heaven now. His grandmother sends him to clean the mill, but the boy explains that it’s broken and proposes they buy another. The family has been penniless since the boy’s grandfather died, but his grandmother agrees to buy the new mill.
As corn and chocolate are traditional indigenous Mexican ingredients, they unmistakably mark Comala as a typical rural town and suggest that its decay over the years also implies a decay in the traditional culture it represents. Crucially, Pedro’s belief that Susana is in heaven here later indirectly introduces a major wrinkle into the novel’s timeline—she was actually very much alive during the time period described in this scene, and by bringing up her death, Pedro is either seeing the future (she dies late in adulthood) or narrating this scene in retrospect, from some time late in his own adulthood. Either way, time is blurry in this novel and the distinctions between the past, present, and future often collapse.
Themes
Pedro’s grandmother sends him to buy the mill from doña Inés Villalpando and inform her that the family won’t be able to pay its debts until the harvest in October. On his way, Pedro’s mother asks him to buy some black taffeta cloth and aspirin. Pedro takes a peso from the flowerpot and runs outside, where people call his name: “Pedro!”
This passage explicitly reveals that the little boy in these last three fragments is a young Pedro Páramo. Despite his apparent wealth and power as an adult, Pedro clearly grows up in a poor, struggling peasant family. This leads readers to question how Pedro not only dug himself out of poverty but rose to the point of owning all the land in sight—and whether this might have something to do with the town eventually being abandoned.
Themes
Fragment 8. Pedro listens to the rain and falls asleep thinking about Susana. It’s still dark when he wakes. Pedro’s mother and Pedro’s grandmother are finishing their prayers across the house. His mother asks him why he didn’t join them to pray for his grandfather, and Pedro replies that he is sad. After she leaves, Pedro can hear his mother sobbing. The church bells mark the hours all night.
This is the second time Rulfo has associated the rain with Susana, Pedro Páramo’s crush, and this association will continue throughout the novel. The rain is also what literally makes Comala fertile and green during Pedro’s childhood, so his love for Susana is also connected to the town’s survival. By portraying Pedro’s grandfather’s death through the religious rituals his family carries out, Rulfo shows that the Church’s job in Comala is to honor the dead and facilitate their transition into the afterlife.
Themes
Fragment 9. Eduviges Dyada tells Juan Preciado that she could have been his mother, but Juan admits that he never heard of her until Abundio mentioned her name. Eduviges remembers that, in the past, Abundio used to send travelers to stay with her, and she’d pay him a small commission. But nobody visits Comala anymore. Abundio was the town’s chatty mailman until, one day, someone set off fireworks next to his head. He went deaf and never spoke again. Juan points out that the Abundio he met definitely could hear, but Eduviges says Abundio is dead, so Juan must have met someone else.
Again, Juan runs into strange contradictions that make the reader start doubting his grasp on reality. First, Eduviges seems to have played an important part in Dolores’s life, and yet Juan knows nothing about her. In a sense, this shows that Juan is successfully reconnecting with hidden elements of his past, but also that his mother’s stories were far from complete. Secondly, Juan certainly met a man named Abundio—who could hear and identified himself by this name—and yet Abundio is dead and was deaf. While it’s possible that Eduviges is wrong, it seems equally possible that Juan met Abundio’s ghost.
Themes
The elderly, withered Eduviges tells Juan about Inocencio Osorio, a fortunetelling horse-tamer who used to give people vigorous massages while predicting their futures. He frequently burst out into frenetic trances and sometimes ended up naked afterwards. And he made so many conflicting predictions that he occasionally got one right. On Dolores and Pedro Páramo’s wedding day, Osorio told Dolores that she could not have sex with Pedro because the moon was inauspicious. Dolores begged Eduviges to take her place, and Eduviges agreed, in part because she secretly had feelings for Pedro. But in bed that night, Pedro never made a move—he just fell asleep. Juan was born a year later, which is why Eduviges says that she was nearly his mother.
Eduviges implies that the ironically named Inocencio Osorio abuses his reputation as a fortuneteller in order to sexually assault the village’s women. But people trust his arbitrary and unreliable predictions anyway, which suggests that his power and influence don’t have any real justification behind them. Pedro’s total disinterest in Dolores—to the point that he doesn’t even realize that it’s actually Eduviges in bed with him on his wedding night—suggests that their marriage was founded on something other than love.
Themes
Juan remembers his mother telling him about Comala’s lush beauty, but Eduviges explains that Pedro’s constant demands and nagging made Dolores miserable. She used to dream about escaping to live with her sister, and when she mentioned this to Pedro, he kicked her out. Pedro stayed bitter. Juan suddenly understands why his mother asked him to “make [Pedro] pay” for neglecting them for so many years. Juan starts telling Eduviges what happened next—he grew up in the city of Colima with his mother’s sister, Gertrudis, who eventually kicked them out. Juan realizes that Eduviges isn’t listening, and she asks him again if he is ready to rest.
Dolores and Eduviges’s opposing visions of the past show how stories—especially memories—often distort reality by carefully erasing certain facts, people, and events from the picture. In other words, Rulfo suggests that getting at the truth about the past means asking what a particular story is leaving out. By meeting Eduviges, who was erased from his mother’s story, Juan gets a much clearer picture of his own origin story. On another note, in abusing and manipulating Dolores, Pedro shows that he puts power before love, and in kicking Dolores out of her house, Gertrudis suggests that Dolores’s hope to find stability in Colima was also misplaced.
Themes
Fragment 10. Pedro Páramo remembers Susana’s death, her desire to leave Comala, and her affection for him. Pedro watches another man instead of working his job on the town’s telegraph machine, but Pedro’s grandmother reminds him that he has to be patient and learn in order to find success. He says patience isn’t for him, and she replies that this doesn’t bode well for his future.
Pedro’s visions of Susana’s death again suggest that he is combining different moments in time. His reluctance to work for his family’s sake foretells his cruelty in the rest of his life. His work at the telegraph and dream of leaving Comala also show how traditions are being uprooted and social norms changed in the world around him. Ironically, however, he ends up staying in Comala forever, to the point of owning the whole town—just like his unconsummated love for Susana, his dreams of going elsewhere prove unfulfillable.
Themes
Fragment 11. Back in the present, Juan hears something, and Eduviges explains that the sound is Miguel Páramo’s horse, which constantly wanders the area, tormented by remorse, looking for its owner. She remembers the night Miguel died. He used to visit a girl in a nearby town called Contla every evening, but one day, his horse galloped by and then Miguel came to visit Eduviges—whom he used to sleep with before meeting the other girl. He told her that, when he went to Contla that day, the town was completely gone and replaced by a cloud of smoke. Eduviges told Miguel that he wasn’t crazy—rather, it sounded like he was dead. He admitted that he jumped a stone fence his father (Pedro) put up. Eduviges offered her condolences and best wishes for the afterlife.
Miguel seems to have manipulated women just like his father, which raises the disturbing question of whether Pedro passed down his wickedness to his sons—and, if so, what this means for Juan himself. Eduviges’s conversation with the dead Miguel offers the first unequivocal sign in the novel that the living and the dead can communicate. Much like Dolores Preciado at the beginning of the novel, Miguel seems to die randomly and unpredictably, without any clear explanation or logic. Yet nobody seems to question it—not even Miguel himself, who scarcely realizes he's dead. The fence that kills Miguel also symbolizes Pedro’s desire to define and close off his own land.
Themes
Eduviges recalls that Pedro, Miguel’s father, sent a messenger for her the next morning. The messenger explained that Miguel’s horse returned home all alone, grief-stricken, and started running around at random. Eduviges asks Juan if he knows what a dead man’s moan sounds like—he doesn’t, and she says he should count himself lucky.
Despite the apparent meaninglessness of Miguel’s death, his horse is devastated and blames itself: somehow, the horse seems to maintain the moral sense that many people (like Pedro and Miguel) have lost in this novel. Tragically, like the mourning ghosts in Comala, the horse’s grief is eternal. This suggests that while life is only temporary, death is permanent, and that death is fundamentally about reckoning with life.
Themes
Fragment 12. Pedro Páramo hears dripping water and footsteps, followed by an unfamiliar voice, crying and asking him to get up. It is Pedro’s mother, wailing because Pedro’s father has just died. Although it is before dawn, his mother is enveloped in a divine light. She says that Pedro’s father was killed, and Pedro asks if the same people killed her, too.
The novel is punctuated by yet another death—or possibly two, if Pedro’s mother is also dead. These early tragedies might help explain how Pedro later mistreats Dolores and becomes such a notorious figure. With his grandfather and now his father gone, Pedro Páramo becomes his family’s patriarch.
Themes
