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Abstract
Juan Rulfo's great talent as a novelist has inspired an overwhelming number of works which present a variety of interpretations of his novel Pedro Paramo (1955).
The Mexican author's collection of short stories, El llano en llamas (1953) has also deserved the critics' careful attention. Several of the analyses of the technical aspects of individual stories are given consideration in this study, but very few critics have dealt with the collection as a whole; we seek to analyse the unifying elements in the collection.
Our study is based on Mieke Bal's Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (1988). We took from each of the three narrative levels (fabula, story and text), definitions of actants, focalization and voice to study the seventeen stories in El llano en llamas. Bal's narratological approach helped us to identify the various agentes which provide focalization in the stories, as well as the nature of the focalization and the objects which are focalized. This approach also helped us prove our initial hypothesis of a confluence of voices functioning always as opponents to the actant's programs. The three formal aspects at work, actants, focalization and voice, do add perspective and depth to the negativism of Rulfo's world. We can see that the manipulation of these fundamental elements in his narrative transcends any anecdote or nationality in order to successfully portray the universal human condition.
