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 37. Back in the past, a mockingbird sings in the distance during a rainstorm, which Fulgor Sedano takes as a sign that things will grow well in Comala that year. Fulgor sends 200 men out of Media Luna and towards the hills on horseback.
The rain again symbolizes the abundance and fertility of Comala in the past—this time, Fulgor makes it explicit. And the hundreds of horsemen reveal that Pedro’s power has grown significantly in Comala by this point in his life.
Themes
Miguel Páramo passes by Fulgor and reports that he’s been “milking” some woman, then heads inside to Damiana Cisneros, who works in the kitchen. He asks Damiana if she knows Dorotea—Damiana says that Dorotea is outside, singing to her rebozo, which she has bundled up like the baby she has lost. Miguel goes outside to make a “proposition” to Dorotea, and when he returns, he asks Damiana to serve Dorotea the same food he gets.
Miguel has clearly inherited his father’s misogyny, as he talks about women as though they were animals. For the first time, Dorotea appears in a scene from the past. Miguel’s “proposition” is clearly that she will help find women for him in exchange for food. While she is clearly aiding and abetting and evil man, just like many of the other sinful characters in this novel, Dorotea is acting out of necessity.
Themes
Meanwhile, Fulgor Sedano notes that the ranch is short on grain and starts to worry about Miguel’s irresponsible behavior. In fact, someone’s just accused him of murder, and he’s left his stallion at the ranch’s front gate, still saddled up. Despite Fulgor’s warnings, Pedro isn’t taking Miguel’s misbehavior seriously. Even when Fulgor told him about the woman who visited Media Luna in tears because Miguel killed her husband, Pedro said it wasn’t a problem because “those people don’t really count.” To get his mind off this drama, Fulgor looks out at the rain again.
History seems to be repeating itself: Fulgor worries about Miguel almost exactly the same way as he worried about young Pedro when don Lucas was still running the ranch. Now that Pedro is in charge, he’s corrupted Fulgor, so his own immorality no longer seems like much of an issue. More starkly than anything else, Pedro’s belief that “those people don’t really count” shows how his obsession with power blinds him to other people's humanity. This contrasts with the way Juan Preciado treats the people he encounters in Comala: even when they are powerless and forgotten, he listens to their stories and recognizes their humanity.
Themes
Fragment 38. Back in the present, Juan Preciado remembers his mother telling him about the smell of rain and beautiful sky in Comala. He tells Dorotea that it is strange that he came to Comala instead of his mother, who was supposed to die there. And he remarks that he also “never saw the sky.” Dorotea replies that she stopped noticing the sky years before, after she gave up hope of reaching heaven. Father Rentería told her that her sins would keep her out of heaven, and without hoping for heaven, she had no reason to live. Juan asks what happened to her soul, and she guesses that it’s waiting for prayers, remorseful and spiteful. In fact, her soul tried to convince her not to commit suicide, but she was eager to let it go.
Comala’s beautiful sky represents both heaven and the town’s idyllic past—and in Dolores Preciado’s memories and the novel’s flashback scenes, the past truly does seem like heaven. Dorotea’s talk about her soul reveals the novel’s counterintuitive implication: the people left in Comala are not souls without bodies, but rather bodies without souls. Dorotea implies that she committed suicide, just like Eduviges, and therefore has to wait for others’ prayers to send her from the purgatory of Comala on to heaven. Again, Dorotea’s desperation suggests that all hope is false hope for people forced to live in the shadows of men like Pedro Páramo and institutions like Father Rentería’s church.
Themes
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Fragment 39. Back in the past, a group of men, led by Fulgor, crowds outside the Media Luna ranch. Pedro Páramo remembers the morning Pedro’s mother tearfully informed him that Pedro’s father had been killed. So many other deaths followed. Right now, Fulgor’s group has Miguel’s body outside, but Fulgor reports that he died alone, because of his horse. As he watches Fulgor’s men lay out Miguel’s body, Pedro Páramo feels detached and worried—but not sorrowful. He sees Miguel’s death as part of his penance. He speaks to the group, then tells Fulgor to have Miguel’s horse put down and complains about how loudly the women are mourning.
Just like Dorotea and Donis’s sister view their imprisonment in Comala as punishment for their sins, Pedro Páramo himself sees the deaths of Miguel and his father as a punishment for his own. His total lack of remorse over Miguel’s death, like the fact that he is more bothered by the women mourning loudly than his son’s actual death, shows that his heartlessness and cruelty cut him off from the human relationships that make life valuable. With all his family members dying, his original goal in life—to settle his family’s debts and rebuild their legacy—loses all meaning. Ironically, Pedro contributes to his family’s destruction in the very process of trying to save it.
Themes
Fragment 40. Father Rentería never forgets the night of Miguel Páramo’s death, which he spent wandering around Comala, unable to sleep. He thinks back to how Pedro Páramo got so much power in Comala, sleeping with all the town’s women but recognizing none of his children as his own, except for Miguel. Father Rentería brought the infant Miguel to Pedro after his mother died in childbirth—but Pedro tried to convince Father Rentería to raise Miguel to be a priest. Father Rentería didn’t want to deal with the child’s evil blood, so Pedro made Damiana take care of him. He and Father Rentería drank to Miguel’s future.
Father Rentería serves as a kind of foil for Pedro Páramo: whereas Pedro barely feels guilty for his actions, Father Rentería fully recognizes his hypocrisy and struggles to come to terms with it. By fathering children with all the town’s women, Pedro literally acts as Comala’s patriarch: he is the father of the next generation. Yet he wants the power that comes with fathering children, but none of the responsibility. By refusing to recognize these children, he ironically prevents them from inheriting the legacy he works his whole life to build. If the evil blood that Rentería talks about is real, then readers should ask if this means Juan Preciado, too, is eternally doomed by his fateful relationship to Pedro Páramo. If this is the case, then blood—like death and forgetting—is just another unavoidable tragedy that prevents people from accomplishing their goals and fully defining the meaning of their lives.
Themes
On the night of Miguel’s death, townspeople call out to Father Rentería as he wanders Comala, asking him if someone has died. (He wants to say that he has.) When he returns home in the morning, Ana reports that several women have stopped by the house, asking to confess. In fact, earlier that morning, he visited the neighboring town of Contla, where he confessed his sins to Contla’s priest. But Contla’s priest refused to pardon Father Rentería for letting Pedro Páramo corrupt the Church. He chastised Rentería for not working harder to save the townspeople in Comala and even suggested that he should lose his position in the ministry.
Plagued by his guilt, Father Rentería has lost the moral authority to faithfully carry out his role in the Church: he cannot legitimately pardon the women in Comala. In contrast, Contla’s priest becomes the voice of reason. But this creates a kind of moral vacuum in Comala: none of the town’s residents can legitimately confess their sins or be pardoned because their priest is himself a sinner. In a sense, because of Father Rentería’s sin, they are all left abandoned by God. Their hopes for justice and salvation will be dashed, because the person who is supposed to lead them has been corrupted.
Themes
The two priests lament that, while their towns’ land is extremely fertile, everything that grows there tastes bitter. But Father Rentería admits that most fruit has stopped growing in Comala. Contla’s priest suggests that this is because the wicked Pedro Páramo owns all the land. Father Rentería says that this “is God’s will,” but Contla’s priest disagrees.
Pedro Páramo’s corruption has reached more than just the Comala’s church: it is affecting the valley itself and even reaching Contla. This makes it clear that Comala’s eventual transformation into a wasteland is precisely because of Pedro Páramo’s influence. Pedro’s cruelty destroys the town, and the town is left barren, a clear reflection of Pedro Páramo’s inner moral depravity. When Father Rentería’s says that Pedro’s monopolistic rule over Comala “is God’s will,” he is twisting religious teachings to excuse existing inequalities and his own personal biases. Rulfo seems to suggest that people can do this with any ideology—so anyone can be corrupted by power, no matter how strong their moral beliefs are or how self-aware they are.
Themes
Back in Comala, Father Rentería admits to Ana that he is evil. He goes to the Media Luna ranch and gives Pedro Páramo his condolences for Miguel’s death. Then, he spends the evening listening to the confessions of Comala’s women. Dorotea is first: she admits to getting drunk at Miguel’s wake and then reveals that she used to set the local girls up with Miguel—she has lost count of how many. Father Rentería asks her if she can forgive herself—she says no—and then tells her that her sins are unpardonable, and she cannot make it to heaven. As the rest of the women confess, one after the other, Father Rentería grows dizzy and sick. He goes outside and tells everyone waiting that they can return the next day for communion, then leaves the church.
It's significant that Father Rentería visits Pedro Páramo before attending the women who are waiting for him. This shows that he fully understands his hypocrisy and yet continues to go along with it. Like Pedro, Father Rentería does not fully appreciate the power he holds: when he tells Dorotea that her sins are unpardonable, she takes this to heart. As she earlier told Juan Preciado, she gave up all hope for heaven at this moment. And yet it’s also clear that Father Rentería is projecting his own guilt onto her: he tells her that her sins are unpardonable because, deep down, he feels unable to pardon himself. As a result, he unnecessarily destroys her. Similarly, when he leaves the rest of the women waiting, he ends up putting his own feelings before their needs. Like with Pedro Páramo, Father Rentería’s moral corruption inevitably spreads, causing more damage than he could have anticipated and even corrupting others.
Themes
Fragment 41. An unidentified woman (who later turns out to be Susana) imagines she is in the bed where her mother died, and she grieves for her. But she is really in a coffin, about to be buried. She thinks about windy February, when fruit ripens under a blue sky and sparrows chirp all around. Her mother died in February—and instead of grief, she felt joy. She was just entering puberty. Justina helped arrange her mother’s wake, and they prayed even though nobody attended. Actually, someone from the church came, asking for money to pay for a mass. But they had none—they spent what they had on the coldhearted gravediggers. Justina lay down on the grave until Susana got her to move on.
Susana’s voice interjects unexpectedly into the novel, and initially she appears to be just another of Comala’s countless forgotten souls. The reader hears her the same way as Juan Preciado: anonymous, lacking context, yearning for her story to be heard and retold. Susana’s monologue also sets her up to be a foil for Juan Preciado, because she, too, opens with the story of her mother’s death. It’s no coincidence that Susana’s mother dies in February and Juan’s in August, the opposite time of year, or that Susana is happy when her mother dies and Juan devastated. These contrasts set Juan and Susana up to be foils of one another who reveal opposite aspects of Pedro Páramo’s life and legacy. Ultimately, although the reader will still listen in from Juan’s perspective, Susana’s voice and story will take over from Juan’s for the rest of the novel.
Themes
Fragment 42. Having overheard the previous fragment, Juan asks if Dorotea was talking in her sleep. Dorotea replies that it is doña Susana, who is buried nearby. She was the last wife to Pedro Páramo, and she still talks to herself endlessly, just like while she was living. Juan recalls that she was talking about her mother, but Dorotea points out that Susana never had a mother and then remembers that this mother was reclusive and sickly. Juan remembers the voice saying that nobody visited her mother’s wake, and Dorotea says this must be why.
By showing Juan and Dorotea overhear and comment on Susana’s monologues, Rulfo puts different episodes from Comala’s history in dialogue. At last, the ghosts in Comala are no longer simply speaking out their stories, waiting to be heard and remembered: finally, someone is listening. Like many of the ghosts in Comala, Susana was much the same in life as she is in death: in fact, the version of her that lives on seems to be a distilled essence of her self. Curiously, even Dorotea forgets Susana’s mother, whereas Juan’s dead mother is an overriding presence throughout the book. She sets the whole novel in motion. This contrast supports the interpretation that Susana’s story is the forgotten history of Comala that Juan has been looking for.
Themes
There are more murmuring sounds, but Dorotea says it’s a different voice—a man. The voice speaks of God saving them one night, when they were covered in blood after Pedro Páramo attacked him. Although he lost an arm and an eye in the attack, the man says it “made [him] more of a man.” Dorotea says that it could be anyone, since Pedro Páramo killed dozens of people. After someone mistook Pedro’s father don Lucas for someone else at a wedding, they shot and killed him, and Pedro took revenge by killing everyone who attended the ceremony.
Like Susana, this man’s voice is initially anonymous, which points to the way most of the people affected by Pedro Páramo’s crimes and cruelty ultimately remain anonymous. Strangely, this man ends up thanking Pedro Páramo for gravely injuring him. Like Father Rentería blames God (instead of himself) for corrupting the Church and helping Pedro Páramo gain power, this man’s thinking gets corrupted by power. He assumes that power is justified, so the people in power must be doing good. This shows that even the victims of unjust power ultimately get corrupted by it and defend it. Dorotea suggests that Pedro’s father’s death—which is totally random and meaningless—in turn spurred Pedro to spread meaningless death. He tries to avenge his father’s death, but he ends up randomly inflicting harm on innocent people, simply because he doesn’t know who to blame. His cruelty and addiction to power can be interpreted as a way of lashing out at the meaninglessness of death.
Themes
Susana starts moaning again and Dorotea asks Juan to listen closely. Dorotea says that Pedro loved Susana and treated her well. In fact, Pedro was devastated after Susana died—he gave up on life and even shut down the Media Luna. With the ranch’s fields abandoned, there was no more work in Comala, so the town’s men started leaving, and their families soon followed. Dorotea stayed, waiting to inherit the land Pedro Páramo promised her. But then the Cristero War broke out, and the few remaining men went to fight, leaving Dorotea alone to starve.
Pedro’s failure to win Susana’s heart sets in motion the collapse of Comala, the history that Juan has been trying to uncover since arriving there. Whereas he treated all the other women in his life like valueless pawns, Pedro seemed to have treated Susana as incomparably precious—but still an object, not a person. Ironically, even though Dorotea tells Juan to listen closely to what Susana is saying, Dorotea starts talking over Susana and ends up telling her story in her place. This reflects the way that many characters struggle to speak for themselves in this novel. Rather than letting herself be defined by the rumors Dorotea has heard, Susana has to talk back and define her own story.
Themes
Fragment 43. Back in the past, Fulgor Sedano tells Pedro Páramo that Bartolomé San Juan has returned to Comala. Fulgor doesn’t know why Bartolomé is back, but he does know that the man moved straight into Pedro’s old house. Pedro chastises Fulgor for not fixing the situation yet, and Fulgor reports that Bartolomé has brought a woman—probably his wife, or maybe his daughter.
This is the first event in Comala that does not appear to go specifically according to Pedro’s plan—but readers will soon learn that he did, in fact, orchestrate it. Moreover, Bartolomé San Juan’s ambiguous relationship with the woman who accompanies him recalls the earlier instances of incest in the novel—most notably, Donis and his sister.
Themes
Fragment 44. Pedro reminisces about Susana, who left Comala in her childhood and did not return for 30 years. He declares that everything he did in Comala was for her, so that she could have everything she could possibly imagine. Pedro even offered a job to her father, don Bartolomé San Juan. But the messenger kept failing to find Bartolomé and deliver him the job offer. Eventually, he did find them, and Bartolomé and Susana finally returned to Comala when violent rebellions broke out in the surrounding area. Pedro was ecstatic and cried tears of joy.
It now becomes clear why Bartolomé’s return matters and, even more importantly, why Pedro went about amassing land and power in Comala with such ruthless determination. He is still fixated on the hopeful fantasy about Susana that occupied him as a young boy, the very first time he appeared in the novel. While this allows him to have his only real burst of emotion in the novel in this scene, it also appears to be the limiting factor that has prevented him from relating to anyone else in Comala on an emotional level or pursuing a loving relationship with any other woman. Pedro did not even inform Fulgor of his plans, which suggests that he either does not trust Fulgor or does not care enough about his judgments to inform him about his overall plan for Comala and the future.
Themes
Fragment 45. Bartolomé San Juan tells Susana, his daughter, that Comala smells unlucky. Everything was alive in La Andromeda, the mine where they were living in the hills, but in Comala things just stagnate and die. Even though he gave them a house, Pedro Páramo is not going to save them. He wants something in exchange: not La Andromeda, the mine, but rather Susana, whom he has loved since their childhoods. Bartolomé considers this scandalous.
Bartolomé’s sense of foreboding here resembles the way Juan Preciado felt at the beginning of the novel, on the road to Comala. Like the Comala of the past, La Andromeda contrasts with the Comala of the present because it is full of life and possibility. The implication is that there is hope for the future in La Andromeda, even if there is also danger, but Comala does not seem to have much of a future at all. It is already in stasis. Even though he loves her, Pedro has presented his request to marry Susana as a transaction: he is trading her, like a piece of property, for the house he promises Bartolomé. This suggests that even his distorted, one-sided version of love does not bring him to treat women as humans or equals.
Themes
Susana insists on going with Pedro. Bartolomé points out that Pedro has already had many other women, and he realizes that he must return to La Andromeda to die. Susana might be a widow, he continues, but she might as well still be living with her husband. Besides, Pedro Páramo is pure evil. Bartolomé insists that Susana is his. But Susana says no—Bartolomé is not her father. She knows it sounds crazy, but she really means it.
Bartolomé’s overwhelming sense that it is time for him to die recalls the way so many other characters in the novel seem to predict the circumstances of their deaths beforehand (like Donis’s sister, who says she is a “sea of mud” before actually dissolving into mud, and Eduviges and Dorotea, who commit suicide despite knowing it to be a mortal sin). Nevertheless, he does not seem to see any deeper meaning in his death—he just knows that it’s time. Like Pedro, he views Susana as a piece of property and marriage as a transaction, so perhaps he thinks that losing possession of Susana means there is no longer any more reason for him to go on living. Bartolomé’s insistence that Susana might as well be living with her husband and Susana’s strange resistance to recognize Bartolomé as her father both lend credibility to the theory that there is something sinister and incestuous about their relationship.
Themes
Fragment 46. Pedro Páramo declares that Susana is the most beautiful woman in the world and then asks Fulgor to make Bartolomé disappear when he returns to the Andromeda mine. This will leave Susana with no option but to marry Pedro. In the meantime, Fulgor will win Bartolomé’s trust by helping him get safe passage to and from the Andromeda mine.
Again, Pedro is so caught up in his feelings about Susana that he does not actually consider what would be best for her. He loves her in the sense that he wants to possess her, no matter what it takes, even if it means grotesquely betraying her by killing her father. Of course, this suggests that Bartolomé is right to sense that he will die if he returns to La Andromeda.
Themes
