SOURCE: “Animal Symbolism in the Fiction of Ramón Sender,” in The Meaning of Existence in Contemporary Hispanic Literature, University of Miami Press, 1969, pp. 99-111.

In the following essay, Schwartz examines animal imagery in the works of Ramón Sender.

Animals and their relationships to man have preoccupied human beings since the beginning of time. Some ancient peoples felt animals to be their brothers in a physiological sense; others believed in metempsychosis. Aesop and Aristotle used animals to reflect human character and to portray individuals or groups. Actual or imagined resemblances between men and animals were used in the Greek drama and epic, in the works of Virgil, Shakespeare, the Bible, and in medieval moralizing and allegorical treatises. In France and elsewhere in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although much of the religious significance of the medieval treatment had been lost, animal life and its importance concerned a...