La Ciudad y Los Perros

Lest there be any doubt about the primacy of the female in this apparently male-dominated novel, let us note that each action within the story, if followed through to its fullest implications, is prompted by a female figure. For example, each of the novel's major characters is interned in the military academy, Leoncio Prado, as a direct result of the disintegration of his association with one or more females. In two different ways the text underlines the feminine influence in the boys' induction into the school (a moment which, of course, is basic to and necessarily precedes all the textual discourse). First, returning us to the origins of life in the academy, the narration repeatedly reverts to the preschool era of each of the three protagonists and shows how a female influenced his decision to enter. Secondly, in each case, an allusion to the entrance examination subtly demonstrates the ambition and motivation on the part of each to do well on that test and leave the known, femaledominated world filled with disintegrated and disintegrating relationships in order to enter the unknown, male-oriented world of the military academy. Ricardo Arana, deprived of his utopian, almost Oedipal relationship with his mother, transfers to the school because he wants to escape his father and because he has realized that his

Art · Humanities · Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism · Galician and Iberian cultural studies · Spanish Literature and Culture Studies