el camino

Author: Miguel Delibes. (Valladolid, Spain. October 17, 1920 - Valladolid, Spain. March 12, 2010)

Through the memory flashbacks of Daniel, the eleven-year-old protagonist of The Path, on the night before his expected departure—for further schooling in the city—from the Castilian village in which he was born and has lived all of his life, the reader enters into the “world” of the protagonist. In that “world,” Daniel’s personal life is projected outward toward the collective life of the village; the individual and his society in this work fuse into an artistic unity. Past and present are also interwoven through Daniel’s memory flashbacks, though the narrator often intervenes to provide his own perspective on the events and situations being recalled. The narrator interjects without destroying the reader’s illusion that the central narrative consciousness is that of the child-protagonist; in fact his added perspective subtly contributes to the narrative’s sense of reality or verisimilitude.