Chapter 1 Close Reading

                The chapter 1 passage begins with the narrator being Juan, yet as the reader we have not yet been introduced to his name yet. Juan’s mother is dying, and he has promised to keep the promise of going to Comala to meet his father.

 “What he should have given me but never did. . . . Make him pay...” (3), this quote shows that Pedro Paramo, Juan’s father, is portrayed as a bad person or a person who has not necessarily made the best choices. We discover later, that Pedro has multiple children and left Juan’s mother. Juan had never meant to keep the promise to his mother, but the idea was continuous within his head. “But before I knew it my head began to swim with dreams and my imagination took flight” (3). Within this passage there is the concept of water and of flight, later in the novel the concept of flight involves birds and the concept of water is centered on Susana. Hope is present at the beginning of the novel and throughout the rest of the novel. Hope is connected to the idea of purgatory, in which there is a place in which someone is stuck and there is no going to a better place such as heaven.