The arid and hostile landscape, vividly and tersely portrayed, communicates the characters' inner world with immediacy. Tragic irony pervades the narrative, revealing an insight into the characters' psyche in a manner intensified by the unexpected and by the force of the rural environment. The narrator discloses the events that have led to the 'present,' including the pilgrimage, the love triangle, Tanilo's horrible death, the quick burial, and the two surviving characters' hell on earth. As the action unfolds in a series of flashbacks, the focus turns toward the adulterers' feelings of remorse and suffering. Instead, he shifts the tension toward the causes of the guilt. Since the reader soon finds out that Tanilo succumbed to his leprosy-like illness, the author removes the expected element of suspense that we usually find in a crime story. The five-part story opens with the protagonist's shocking self-accusation as his brother's killer, a technique that reveals the outcome from the beginning. In a quiet, understated manner that belies his inner torment, the narrator describes Tanilo's severe disease, his own physical relationship with his sister-in-law, Natalia, and the trio's journey to Talpa in search of a cure. He is successful in incorporating the afterlife with his characters' existence amidst an ethereal, yet strongly delineated, reality.īy means of an interior monologue the protagonist of 'Talpa' traces the progressive intensification of his guilt at his brother's death.

Rulfo, like many other Latin American writers of his time, greatly admired his American predecessor, but he went a step further to create the atemporal perspective of 'wandering souls' whose raw emotions he conveys in strong visual images.

Behind the realistic, clearly Mexican topo-graphic, social, and cultural elements, however, a strong mythical reality imbues Rulfo's unique world, recalling William Faulkner's phantasmagoric landscape.

The stories of The Burning Plain fall into the category of regionalism, a prominent subgenre in twentieth-century Latin American literature. 'Talpa,' a tale of adultery, death, and remorse, is an integral part of Rulfo's Dantesque scheme. Like his landmark novel Pedro Páramo (1955), the 1953 story collection The Burning Plain and Other Stories ( El llano en llamas) depicts characters doomed to roam an arid landscape while bearing the weight of their sins. A segment of a distinguished but small literary production, the story 'Talpa' contains many elements that characterize the fiction of the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo.

El llano en llamas by Juan Rulfo