The Future

Throughout the novel, the author uses Gonzalo’s, Carla’s, and Vicente’s relationships with one another to consider the way that closeness and intimacy shape the individual’s relationship with the future. At the start of the novel, Gonzalo’s and Carla’s adolescent relationship appears capable of surviving into the future. However, following their breakup, and later following the birth of Carla’s son, the future becomes a more amorphous and bleak frontier. Shortly after Carla reconnects with Gonzalo in Part II, the narrator says that Vicente’s birth “had obliterated her idea of the future, an idea that, to tell the truth, had never been fully formed, or was formed indistinctly, with touches of fantasy, and had never felt urgent to define” (51). Prior to her son’s birth, Carla, like Gonzalo, was free to imagine into the future however she chose and...