Alejo Carpentier Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Frances Wyers Weber

Critical Essay by Frances Wyers Weber

SOURCE: "El acoso: Alejo Carpentier's War on Time," in PMLA, Vol. LXXVIII, No. 4, September, 1963, pp. 440-48.

In the following essay, Weber analyzes the narrative structure of Manhunt, identifying various thematic motifs related to character and chronological development.

The protagonist of Alejo Carpentier's short novel El acoso is an informer fleeing from men who would avenge the deaths he has caused. The pursuit and punishment of an informer, not a new plot, is usually developed with rapid pacing and suspense. But Carpentier modifies this traditional story of the chase by breaking it into a mosaic of fragmentary incidents and remembrances arranged without chronological sequence. Adopting certain techniques of the stream-of-consciousness writers, he reduces external action to a minimum and uses interior monologues and confused shreds of memory to show the inner life of his characters. Yet his work is not primarily a psychological study: the combination of two apparently...
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