New Life in Death

The first chapter of the novel, Pedro Paramo, simply provides some insight and background for the rest of the novel.  It's as if Juan, the narrator in the 1st person point of view, feels as though he must explain to the reader why he travels to Comala immediately, before anything else.  He speaks to the reader as if he is a close friend, and he needs to explain his situation.  This method grasps the reader's attention and makes him feel connected to the novel itself after reading the very first sentence.  Juan's mother dies at the start of the novel and she tells him to go and find Pedro Paramo, the father that he never knew.  She wanted her son to make "him pay for all the years he put us out of his mind". At first, he didn't want to fulfill the promise, but soon his "head began to swim with dreams".  Juan Rulfo makes an interesting transition between death (Juan's mother) into liveliness, where thoughts and the imagination are personified as human, living.  The concepts that the author utilizes within this beginning passage, death and hope, juxtapose.  Juan's mother is dead, but yet he becomes full of hope ("...I began to build a world around a hope centered on the man called Pedro Paramo").  Rulfo structures his first chapter in an interesting way, his first and final lines in the chapter coincide or repeat one another, "I came to Comala because..." and then "That was why I had come to Comala."  It's as if special emphasis has to be placed on going to Comala, perhaps to foreshadow or act as a basis for the rest of the text.