The Ambiguity of Orozco's Virtue in Galdos' "La Incognita" and "Realidad

F ROM THE TIME of the appearance of Benito Pe after asserting that is a superior being, he goes on to affirm that there are factors which attenuate the protagonist's goodness: Pero es tambien tipo grande y a pesar de la aparente sencillez de su bondad de una pieza, es complicado. iY que complicaci6n la suya!'2 L. B. Walton, on the other hand, is oblivious to any subtleties in Orozco's characterization; he hastily dismisses as a Maxi taken seriously.' Joaquin Casalduero hints at a negative aspect of Orozco's morality when he declares that Orozco se rige por la propia conciencia, suya severidad y exigencia no conoce paliativos.'4 Gald6s' biographer, H. Chonon Berkowitz, without elaborating, but certainly referring to Orozco's benign reaction to his wife's infidelity, speaks of flashes of new morality in Realidad.' Sherman Eoff states specifically that Orozco's ideal of saintly living becomes a hard egotistical pride, which results from his self-imposed task of generating spirituality.' In an article dealing with in Gald6s' novels, Monroe Z. Hafter makes this succinct comment on Orozco's goodness: The ironic reprise in La incdgnita, and Realidad shows that the will to do good appears in all men incompletely, fused with all the other motives of human personality to emerge with disparate and sometimes contradictory guises.7 More recently, Gerald Gillespie views as primarily a seeker of the essence of ultimate reality, though he does comment on Orozco's increasing alienation from the world,8 a scarcely tacit acknowledgment that the saint's virtue does not remain unalloyed

Alienation · Character (mathematics) · Epistemology · Humanities · Morality · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Theology · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Spanish Literature and Culture Studies