SOURCE: Webb, Barbara J. “The Myth of El Dorado: Los pasos perdidos and Palace of the Peacock.” In Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction: Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, and Edouard Glissant, pp. 61–81. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Webb compares Palace of the Peacock with Alejo Carpentier's Los passos perdidos (The Lost Steps), observing that both novels depict a symbolic quest for cultural and personal identity within the context of Caribbean history.

In Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps, 1953) and Harris's Palace of the Peacock (1960), Latin American and Caribbean history is the context of a search for cultural and personal identity. The basic similarity between Lost Steps and Palace is the evocation of the history of the European conquest and the search for gold in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is symbolically represented in the quest motif of the legend of El Dorado...