Pedro Paramo Chapter 1...The Beginning of Payback, Or the Beginning of an End?

Pedro Páramo Close Reading: Chapter 1

While the first chapter of Pedro Páramo may be brief, it is embedded with a great amount of literary devices and techniques. To start off, the tone of the passage is unusually climatic, considering it is the first chapter of the novel. Rulfo gives a certainty/confidence to Juan’s tone to help him believe that he will find his father. In a way, the passage is foreshadowing what will not happen, because of how confident Juan is to start off. Along with that, there is a sign of failure because the novel starts off with an ending…death. On the very first page of Pedro Páramo, the motif of death is brought up, implying that a great amount of death is yet to come and that Juan’s mission probably will not turn out the way he expects it to. He might not make the man who had been his mother’s husband pay.