Death, Hope, and Despair Theme Analysis

Pedro Páramo interweaves multiple stories set in the small Mexican town of Comala. In one, Pedro Páramo gradually amasses power until he owns the whole town and fathers everyone born there. In a second story, Pedro’s childhood sweetheart, Susana San Juan, returns to Comala to marry him but lives out her final days bedridden and locked in her room. Many years later, in the novel’s main frame story, Juan Preciado visits Comala after his dying mother, Dolores, asks him to track down his father, Pedro Páramo. Although he’s initially hopeful, Juan finds Comala full of its former residents’ ghosts, wandering endlessly in a kind of purgatory, without any hope for salvation. Eventually, Juan himself dies and becomes one of these ghosts. In Pedro Páramo, hope is a futile form of self-deception that ultimately leads to despair: it gives people a false sense of meaning, when in reality life and death are meaningless. Accordingly, for Juan Rulfo, human beings are stuck in a tragic dilemma with no right answer. They can strive for the impossible, despite the inevitability of failure and death, or they can accept the universe’s meaninglessness and moral disorder.

The novel’s characters fall into despair because their hopes—which represent the sense of meaning and purpose they feel in life—are inevitably dashed. This is particularly true of Rulfo’s three protagonists. Juan Preciado goes to Comala because he “build[s] a world around a hope centered on the man called Pedro Páramo.” But Pedro is dead and Juan cannot claim his inheritance, so this world gets totally destroyed and he ends up with nothing to live for. Similarly, Pedro lives in a fantasy world, amassing land and power to try and woo Susana. When they finally marry, Susana appears to be incapacitated by some unexplained trauma. But privately, she is dreaming of a freedom she knows she will never achieve. Both Pedro and Susana live in service of a single hope—Pedro wants a blissful marriage with Susana, and Susana wants to live on her own terms. Pedro and Susana fail to achieve their conflicting hopes for reasons outside their control. Susana cuts herself off from the world until she dies, which dashes Pedro’s hopes and leads him to do the same. He lives out his days sitting in his chair, frozen in despair. Ultimately, Juan, Pedro, and Susana’s worlds all come crashing down when they realize that their fundamental hopes are unfulfillable.

Having long ago undergone the same process, the people of Comala live in a kind of permanent despair that illustrates the dangers of false hope. For instance, Eduviges Dyada spent her whole life trying to marry and mother children for the men of Comala, but all of them turned their backs on her, and she committed suicide out of despair. In the afterlife, she wanders around Comala endlessly with other lost souls who both recognize that they need prayers if they want to make it to heaven and harbor no illusions about ever getting there. If Juan, Pedro, and Susana’s failures show that hope is a short-lived illusion that inevitably leads to disappointment, then the wandering lost souls of Comala’s townspeople show that this disappointment is permanent and torturous.

Rulfo specifically implies that hope is futile because death is meaningless and random: it has no moral purpose in the universe. While the novel’s characters try to give meaning to death, just like they give meaning to life through hope, this always fails. For instance, Dolores Preciado dies without avenging Pedro Páramo’s theft of her property. And though Juan visits Comala to avenge it for her, he achieves nothing except his own death. He tries to restore the moral order of the universe, only to discover that there is no such order.

More frequently, the novel’s characters try to make death meaningful through religion. But Comala’s priest, Father Rentería, saves the souls of immoral people who pay him—like the murderer and rapist Miguel Páramo—instead of morally pure and well-meaning people like Eduviges and Dorotea, who have no money. Rentería promises that the afterlife will make up for the injustices these women experience, meaning that death will redeem life and restore the moral order of the universe. But ultimately, it doesn’t: the evil make it to heaven and the benevolent get stuck in the purgatory of Comala, “sits […] at the very mouth of hell.” Dorotea and Eduviges die randomly, inexplicably, and meaninglessly. Feeling cheated and devastated, their spirits wander Comala eternally in despair. In fact, many characters die specifically because of despair—Juan, Pedro, Susana, Eduviges, and Dorotea all give up on life when their hopes are dashed and then die shortly thereafter. Juan even reports sighing and sadness as his mother’s cause of death. False hope leads the novel’s characters to disappointment, meaningless, and death, but the alternative is no better: eschewing hope from the start would mean accepting the meaninglessness of life and accomplishing nothing. (This would leave people like Pedro Páramo, who sits paralyzed in his chair for years, or the lost souls who wander Comala eternally.)

After dying, Juan Preciado tells Dorotea that “hope brought me here.” She responds, “Hope? You pay dear for that.” Here, “hope” is not the common Spanish word esperanza, but rather the more literary ilusión, which refers to an impossible, false hope based on misperception and misjudgment. In a sense, Rulfo sees all hope as ilusión: all human beings die with their goals at least partially unfulfilled. Death does not provide a meaningful closure to life, like in (most) literature and movies; rather, it just happens, leaving people’s hopes unfulfilled and their life projects incomplete. The only way to live without risking disappointment is to accept this fact—and yet life without hope is stagnant and pointless. Rulfo thus suggests that everyone is doomed live out the same tragic pattern of hope, failure, and accepting despair.