SOURCE: "Myth, Contingency, and Revolution in Carlos Fuentes's La región más transparente," in Comparative Literature, Vol. 43, No. 4, Fall, 1991, pp. 326-45.

In the following essay, Van Delden explores Fuentes's treatment of the "nature of the self and its relations to history and the community" in La región más transparente, and also examines some of the author's other works.

La región más transparente (1958), Carlos Fuentes's first novel, oscillates between two different perspectives on the nature of the self and its relations to history and the community. On the one hand, the novel outlines a view of the self that derives primarily from existentialist ideas found in the works of André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. In this view, the self is discontinuous, contingent, wholly unaffected by any kind of socio-cultural conditioning permanently separated from a stable and enduring core of meaning—and it...