Societal Hypocrisy and Failure in Vargas Llosa’s ‘The Cubs’
Hypocrisy and Marginalization
Cuéllar is attacked and emasculated by a dog and, therefore, condemned by his group of friends, a castration that will be hidden forever. Cuéllar tries to fill this gap by displaying his physical strength, creating false expectations in his environment. He becomes even more feminine, failing and dragging himself to commit the madness that ultimately leads to his eventual death. After the castration, the boy’s life will never be the same; he must confront the social hypocrisy of the world that unfolds daily. For example, the brothers at the school he attends continue to get good grades, but they are no longer deserved. His parents grant all the quirks that Cuéllar wants or desires. No mention is made of what happened, and Cuéllar continues his life as if nothing had occurred. Cuéllar is simply different, which breaks the norm in which the group is well established. When young people start dating, it leads to a road banned for Cuéllar, so he falls into moral hypocrisy to save face. The group takes advantage of this and has fun with it. The hypocrisy of the group precipitates Cuéllar’s fall into the bourgeois society of Miraflores. The group lives on lies and absolute hypocrisy. So when Cuéllar does not dare to declare his love for Teresa, because he loves her very much, everyone’s reaction is to call him “queer”.
Failure, Frustration, and Death
In The Cubs, failure is represented in the figure of “Pichula” Cuéllar and the group to which he belongs. Finally, the young protagonist becomes a penitent toward a final journey toward death and toward self-knowledge of it. As progress is made in reading the novel, one can appreciate how failure is taking hold of Cuéllar’s life: social failure because he has not been accepted into the group, personal failure because Cuéllar does not end up having a relationship with Teresa, and failure in Cuéllar’s attempts to find a solution to the problem. The character’s physical death is preceded by his symbolic death. At one point in the novel, one can see a passage in which the flutter of a butterfly is associated with death, just as “Pichula” dies in his own car. The physical death of the protagonist symbolizes the frustration of his own group of friends since, after Cuéllar’s death, they no longer have a unit of social cohesion. Indeed, the novel ends with the beginning of a new cycle of frustration and physical degradation of the boys.
Narrative Voice and Technique
There is a narrative voice that is supposed to speak anonymously for the whole group in the third person plural, but of course, it also fails to include Cuéllar in this group. The collective narrative voice and the anonymous narrative voice melt, reaching a juxtaposition that creates a rapid pace that deftly combines the subjective (voiced by “us”) and the objective (voiced by “them”). The alternation between the use of the first and third person is because the real narrator of this novel is outside of the story, dominating the whole narrative. The narrator is as true as a collective group; at times, an individual is highlighted, while at others, he remains hidden behind the group and fused with each and every one of the characters. The “protean character narrative technique” is used, combining the third and first person plural in the same sentence, but always fluidly within the context and without allowing the connection to break, without separating the monologue and dialogue. This technique involves simultaneously expressing objective and subjective reality, even in the same sentence, as can be seen from the first lines of The Cubs. Finally, we must clarify that this is a short novel because the internal time of the action is very long and ranges from the infancy to the maturity of the characters.