SOURCE: "The Burning Plain: The Later Stories," in Juan Rulfo, Twayne Publishers, 1983, pp. 43-62.

In the following excerpt from his full-length study of Rulfo, Leal offers a thematic analysis of the more recent stories collected in his short story collection.

Some of the fifteen stories collected in 1953 under the title of one of them, El llano en llamas [The burning plain], had appeared . . . in the journals Pan and América between 1945 and 1951. There is no appreciable difference between these stories and the others, either in style or technique. It is not known if some of the latter were written earlier, but not published. It is a possibility but difficult to ascertain, either by internal or external evidence. The problem is not serious, however, since the span of years is not broad, and all fifteen stories must have been retouched before publication in book form.

It is interesting to...