Mario Vargas Llosa's Conversation In The Cathedral

Mario Vargas Llosa has been writing on politics since the early 1960s. Early in his career, Llosa believed that true socialism might be a possibility in Latin America, but gradually, he came to the conclusion that the Cuban model would not guarantee intellectual freedom. He was attracted towards Jean Paul Sartre’s ideas of commitment. When he leaned away from leftist ideology, Albert Camus became his ethical model. Camus has rejected totalitarianism as a social system where human beings become an instrument of state power. He turned away from Sartre’s view that creative writers play a key role in transformation of society. Instead, he felt that literary freedom can be affront to oppressive or totalitarian regimes. He believes that literature is a form of protest against the world as we find it. The political leadership …show more content…
Here, Llosa engages the strategies of realistic narration and yet challenges the assumptions of realism. In this sense, it is situated between the narrative realism and magical realism. Llosa bases his fiction on the recorded histories of nations and individuals, though not always explicitly. Since the meaning has become unstable due to changes in social structures, postmodernist fiction centres on local manifestation rather than big narratives. Llosa himself assumes that that the concept of history must itself be located historically. The hero Santiago Zavala, is partly autobiographical character. He leaves the communist Cahuide Party after participating in the workers strike at San Marcos University. He is arrested and released because of a deal struck between his wealthy and capitalist father Don Fermin and Cayo Bermudez, Odria's shadowy secret police chief. Through Zavalita’s character Llosa has expressed doubts about the communist regimes. According to Neil