Previous
Pedro Segundo García
Clara’s dog. After Marcos dies, Barrabás is found among Marcos’s possessions as a puppy. He is delivered to Severo and Nívea de Valle’s along with Marcos’s body, and Clara instantly falls in love with him. Barrabás is of an unknown breed, and he has a tail that can clear tables with a single swipe. Barrabás never leaves Clara’s side, but he is mysteriously stabbed and killed the night of Clara and Esteban Trueba’s engagement party. Severo and Nívea fear the dog’s death is a bad omen, but the wedding progresses as planned. As a wedding present, Esteban has Barrabás made into a rug, and he presents the rug to Clara when he gives her the big house on the corner. Clara faints at the sight of Barrabás as a rug, and the rug spends years stored in the basement until Clara’s granddaughter, Alba, resurrects the rug and puts it back in Clara’s bedroom. Barrabás’s presence is felt in three generations of del Valles, which underscores the family’s profound connection and shared history throughout the years.
Barrabás Quotes in The House of the Spirits
The The House of the Spirits quotes below are all either spoken by Barrabás or refer to Barrabás. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1 Quotes
Barrabás came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. She was already in the habit of writing down important matters, and afterward, when she was mute, she also recorded trivialities, never suspecting that fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire The House of the Spirits LitChart as a printable PDF.
"My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
Barrabás Character Timeline in The House of the Spirits
The timeline below shows where the character Barrabás appears in The House of the Spirits. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: Rosa the Beautiful
“Barrabás came to us by sea,” Clara writes neatly in her notebook. She records all important...
(full context)
...be the most painful experience of Clara’s young life if not for the arrival of Barrabás with Marcos’s possessions. Barrabás is a rather large puppy, and Clara loves him immediately.
(full context)
Severo wants to get rid of the puppy, but Clara insists they keep him, so Barrabás settles in and begins to grow. They don’t know his breed, although Clara is sure...
(full context)
...to even enter the dining room. She goes to the garden and curls up with Barrabás, and over the ensuing days grows increasingly distant from everyone, even Nana. Severo tries to...
(full context)
Chapter 3: Clara the Clairvoyant
Barrabás follows Clara everywhere, and if Clara isn’t foretelling the future or knitting (the only domestic...
(full context)
...more attention to the spirits, she realizes it has been hours since she last saw Barrabás. Suddenly, a scream of horror cuts through the crowd, and the people part as Barrabás,...
(full context)
...to look down, and she notices that she is standing on a rug made of Barrabás. She takes one look into the dog’s glass eyes and faints. Férula reminds Esteban that...
(full context)
Chapter 4: The Time of the Spirits
...a scandal, Esteban stores the head in the basement next to Marcos’s trunks and the Barrabás rug. Nana moves in to help Férula with Nicolás and Jaime, but the only thing...
(full context)
Chapter 9: Little Alba
...in the basement among the old furniture, pieces of Covadonga, Marcos’s old trunks, and the Barrabás rug.
(full context)
Epilogue
...in the middle of the room, a canary in a cage in the corner and Barrabás’s head staring at her from the rug below. When Alba arrived back at the big...
(full context)
...notebooks so Alba could one day reclaim the past, and Alba does the same now. “Barrabás came to us by sea…” she begins.
(full context)
