Familiar Patterns: Rejection and Fleeing in the Narrative of the McOndo Generation

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a new means of examining the way in which the domestic space influences the protagonists of the three following novels written by McOndo authors: Mala onda by Alberto Fuguet, Vidas ejemplares by Sergio Gómez and Fue ayer y no me acuerdo by Jaime Bayly. Until now little research has been conducted on the works of the McOndo generation with reference to the protagonists' typically dysfunctional familiar situations. Delving deeper into their sparsely related and virtually untold childhoods, this dissertation seeks to find the core of the protagonists' problems and explains how their childhood experiences have led to their near total destruction as adolescents and young adults. The narrative analysis is supported with the theoretical framework of Judith Butler, Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein, whose scholarly contributions link gender, psychoanalysis and early childhood development to the protagonists' search for individual identity. The protagonists represented within the pages of these narratives live in what the McOndo authors refer to as the true reality of Latin America during the last three decades of the twentieth century. This globalized and virtual reality is anything but the exotic or magical space represented by Gabriel García Márquez‘s fictional city Macondo in Cien años de soledad. Instead, the backdrops of these narratives are crime-ridden (sub)urban spaces which are seemingly the spaces from which the protagonists long to flee. These adolescents and young adults who are troubled by familiar expectations, rejection and abandonment have another agenda in mind, however, and that is to escape from that which has caused the gravest threat to their wellbeing: their family. In an attempt to recuperate the missing link to happiness, the protagonists are faced with a challenge: whether or not they pardon their family. My study of psychoanalysis and gender formation leads to the conclusion that the unhealthy relationships between the protagonists and their parents result from the emotional loss of the parent(s) during early childhood. The physical loss of the parent(s) during adolescence or early adulthood is what leads the protagonist to flee, but is also what ironically leads them to forgiveness.