Ideologia y narración en Heredarás un mar que no conoces y lenguas que no sabes de Alfonso Barrera Valverde.

Abstract

Heredaras un mar que no conoces y lenguas que no sabes (Mama Zoila), the Latin American bestseller by Alfonso Barrera Valverde, has been the subject of many newspaper and critical reviews but rarely has consideration of the novel gone beyond this medium. This thesis attempts to do this by studying the fact that, while Heredaras is a novel entrenched in the realities of Ecuadorian society, it adopts a critical view of the foundations upon which this society was built. Heredaras is highly critical of the social, political, economic and ecclesiastic realities of Ecuadorian life. The critical perspective permeates the ideological stance of the novel, that is, of the narrator/implied author. Two main components inform this ideological stance: socialism and liberation theology. Thus the first chapter of the thesis is divided into two sections. The first describes the socio-political and economic realities in Ecuador from a socialist perspective. This is followed by a discussion of how these realities are incorporated or represented in the novel--in the characters. their relationships and the situations in which they find themselves. The second section does the same for liberation theology, by underlining its main features and by discussing how they are represented novelistically. The second chapter of the thesis offers a study of the narratological elements which contribute to the ideological stance of the novel: the status of the narrator and the narrator's phraseological and perceptual stances. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)