Violent Acts - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages act of violence and torture on the peasant women of his hacienda, and sometimes on his wife, Clara reflects the greater violence afflicted on the people by the military regime after the election. There is a kind of ‘poetic justice’ that Allende seems to have maintained in the depiction of violence in her novel. Colonel Esteban Garcia’s raping and torturing of Alba somehow completes the circle of injustice that Alba’s grandfather had done on Garcia’s grandmother and father. In the first half of the story, Clara’s sister Rosa accidentally dies of poison that was meant for her father. In both the cases, Rosa and Alba suffer for no crime of theirs. They were innocent, just like the hundreds of men, women and children of Chile who were victims of violence and bloodshed in the 70s for no sin of theirs. Though Allende nowhere directly mentions the ‘capital city’ in the novel to be Chile, it is quite understandable from the depiction of facts and events. Her attitude to violence and its long term consequences is explicit in the writings of Alba,
"The day my grandfather tumbled Pancha Garci­a among the rushes of the riverbank, he added another link to the chain of events that had to complete itself. Afterward the grandson of the woman who was raped repeats the gesture with the granddaughter of the rapist, and perhaps forty years from now my grandson will knock Garci­as granddaughter down among the rushes, and so on down through the centuries in an unending tale of sorrow, blood, and love." (Allende, 432).
Allende’s fear of never-ending violence grapping mankind in the coming years surfaces when she addresses crime as a ‘chain of events’ that will keep on growing bigger and bigger through revenge and retribution. More revenge will lead to more violence which will ultimately bring doom to the entire mankind. So Allende looks to the future with hopes for a violence-free peaceful world when Alba feels like forgiving her torturer at the end.
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