SOURCE: "Narrative Tension and Structural Unity in Cela's La familia de Pascual Duarte," in Symposium, Vol. XXXI, No. 2, Summer, 1977, pp. 165-78.

In the following essay, Thomas discusses the social and ontological questions in Cela's La familia de Pascual Duarte.

In past years, a fundamental difference of opinion has prevailed among critics of Cela's La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942). On the one hand, historians of Spanish post-Civil War fiction such as Gonzalo Sobejano, Pablo Gil-Casado, and Eugenio G. de Nora have presented a "social" interpretation of the novel. These scholars contend that Cela's first novelistic effort illustrates the decadent socio-economic condition of Spanish society surrounding the years of internal strife from 1936 to 1939. Robert Spires, Paul Ilie, and Robert Kirsner, on the other hand, have stressed the work's "ontological" focus, asserting that its pages represent an inward search for self-definition independent of societal considerations. A partial resolution to the problems...