| A | B |
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| Why has Juan Preciado come to Comala? | he is searching for his father, for whom the novel is named |
| What does Juan's mother Dolores Preciado ask her son to do as she lays on her deathbed? | To go to Comala, which is the town where she was raised to find his fatheer and her estranged husband, Paramo. |
| How does Juan find the previously lush green place that used to be Comala? | it is a literal ghost town teeming with specters that reside in a dry, dead valley plain where only remnants of life still remain. |
| How is Pedro Paramo remembered in Comala? | he was a strong man from Mexico and Latin America (cacique) who rises to power by way of violence, manipulation, and bribery. He affects the lives of all the Comalans and is largely responsible for the downfall of this town. |
| What does Juan realize about every person he has spoken to since arriving in Comala? | Every person is a specter. In Comala ghosts, disembodied spirits of the dead, wander the streets and interact with Juan. They are dead come back from teh graves |
| Who does Juan Preciado share a common grave with after he dies? | Dorotea or la Cuarrataca (go-between in Comala) |
| What does Dorotea teach Preciado? | about the tortured souls that populate the cemetary and guides him through the fragmented labyrinth of murmullos. She is a ghostly witness of Comala's recent past. |
| What motivates the ghosts to haunt Comala? | the need of the ghost to settle accounts with the living, something is owed to the dead and they must return to collect their due. Although haunting is sometimes symbolized by material or financial exchange, the medium of exchange within the economy is remembrance. |
| What motivates Juan's return to Comala? | a desire to learn his roots and to collect on an unpaid memory debt owed to him and his mother. Juan is to collect or make a claim against the lack of remembrance with which Pedro Paramo treated his estranged wife and son. |
| Why is Juan the subject of the hauntings? | He shared thick relations with the ghosts in life. The dead are assured that they will live on in the remembrances of those who mourn them. They care enough to ensure that the dead will be remembered. |
| Why do many of Comala's dead haunt their town as disembodied spirits? | They were improperly buried or were not paid their memory debt. They are waiting for somebody to come and listen, someone who can be their advocate and release them from their damned state. |
| Why didn't Juan ever know his father? | His father had cast his pregnant wife out (Dolores) and kept the land that he obtained by marrying Dolores. Juan travels to his mother's hometown to demand payment form his father on an unpaid memory debt. |
| Who guides Juan into Comala? | Abundio Martinez, a mule driver he meets at crossroads near Comala. Abundio is a specter and his half-brother |
| Why does Abundio approach his father in anger and desparation seeking financial help? | Pedro's illigitimate son can not afford to give his own wife a proper burial and seeks help from his wealthy father. His requesst represents his obligation and desire to properly carry out an act of mourning and remembrance for his wife and to do otherwise would be terrible since the dead who are not properly buried often are those that return. |
| How is Miguel Paramo treated differently than Abundio? | He was an illigitimate son who Pedro recognizes by adopting and giving him the paternal name. |
| What happens when Pedro Paramo refuses to acknowledge his estranged son's appeal? | There is a tragic and violent exchange that ends in the death of both father and son |
| Why does Abundio's ghost guide Juan to the inframundo and who him the boundaries of his father's ranch? | because he continues to return to this father's house each night to haunt him, still seeking in vain to collect the unpaid symbolic debt of recognition and remembrance. |
| How does Juan die in Comala? | The hauntings torment him to the point of death. The murmullos are too much for Juan Preciado to bear. Juan dies in Comala precisely because of a misconception of what searching for his father means, if it weren't for his imaginations, Juan would not hae gone to Comala. He may be driven by an economic debt. |
| What happens when Gerardo, Paramo's lawyer goes to his boss to collect the money that he believes pedro Paramo owes him? | Pedro Paramo only gives him 1/5 of the money that he seeks |
| Who was the object of Pedro's desires? | Susana San Juan |
| What is the strange and tragic occurrence that happens when Susana dies? | This is the beginning of the end because the church bells of the region ring continually for three days to announce her death but people arrive from elsewhere and start to celebrate the sufferings of Pedro Paramo. Susana is not properly mourned, the debt of remembering her is not paid and therefore, Pedro Paramo who has been haunted by Susana virtually his whole life does not need to wait for the dead to return. |
| Why does Paramo take it upon himself to make the people of Comala pay for their disregard for his deceased love object? | He wants to avange the slighted honor of Susana |
| Why doesn't Susana San Juan's ghost rest? | She was improperly mourned and had an apparent psychosis that existed from her early childhood. She is a tortured soul in life and death. |
| Why is Paramo the catalyst for Comala becoming a godless ghost town? | Because the inhabitants receive no forgiveness for their sins and wander the streets asking for prayers and remembrance from anyone who is still living so that they may leave purgatory. Paramo's refusal to acknowledge any memory debt that he owes perpetuates the failure of the economy of haunting in this book |
| What function does the ghost represent? | the ghost is a witness to the forgotten past that can transcend time and death in order to give a testimony of the past in the present. Literature allows te past to come back and to remind the present of its forgotten or repressed history. |
| How does Juan guide the reader from modernity to the rural past? | rural Mexico and towns such as Comala are among the others of history that were left out of the official state history and discourse of modernity. it emphasizes the ghostly nature of Mexican's agrarian past in relation to the modern city. The campesinos and the ranchos represent the repressed in the collective mexican memory or the forgotten past. Spirits represent ghosts of real people that have been forgotten or excluded from Mexico's history. |
| How does this book explore Mexican social history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century? | the decadent remnants of a quasi-feudal social order, violent revolutions, and a dramatic exodus from the countryside to the city all gave rise to ghost towns across Mexico. The rise of the modern city coincides more closely with the end of the revolutionary era. When people left the city, or some other more prosperoud town, Comala is forgotten. |
| Why is Sayula an important referent in Pedro's Paramo? | it is regarded as a living, prosperous place which stands in sharp contrast to a very dead, forlorn Comala. It is city teeming with life and a place of prosperity. |
| How did the post revolution exodus to the urban centers affect Comala? | Comala like other pueblos became a ghost town in part because of the post-revolution exodus to the urban centers |
| Who was Pedro Renteria? | Pedro Paramo's obedient priest |
| Who was Fulgor Sedano? | Pedro's faithful henchman |
| What is the relationships between the generations of ghosts? | Pedro Paramo is the story of a family dealing with its own ghosts and skeletons in the closet. Many of the characters in Rulfo's novel suffer devastating traumas that affect them for not only the rest of their lives but beyond death as well. In some cases, the effects of the trauma are seemingly inherited while in other they are not. |
| Who is Susana San Juan? | She is the cacique's object of desire and a woman who lives a haunted life. She and Pedro were childhood playmates in Comala. Pedro wants Susano near in order to redeem him from his torturous past and to take him again to the childhood that he remembers. |
| What happens to Susana's mother? | She dies from tubercolosis and not a single soul goes to her funeral because they are afraid of contracting the disease. She leaves after her mother's death and does not return for years. When she returns, she is emotionally absent. |
| Who is Justina? | Pedro's servant |
| What happens when Justina apologizes to Susan for her cat? | She informs Susana that her father Bartolome San Juan died in a mine outside of town. Susana then associates the cat with her father and begins to laught, demonstrating her incapacity to deal with death and mourning. Possible allusions to an incestuous relationship between father and daughter in the text. |
| How does the death of Don Lucas, Pedro's father affect Pedro? | He killed many people trying to avenge his father's death. |
| How does Pedro change after the death of Susana? | He ceases to live his life after Susana dies, he lets his fortunes crumble, sends away most of the workers and sits in his chair staring in the direction of the cemetary remembering Sussan, thus transforming himself into a living vessel of memory dedicated to his lost love object. |
