Resumo de The City And The Dogs - Mario Vargas Llosa

Context

Of The author:
- Winner of the Brief Library Reward, of Barcelona, with his novel The city and the dogs (1963)
- The writer departs from his own autobiographical experience. He studied two years in the military school Leoncio Prado, in Lima. Vargas Llosa was 26 years old when he wrote the novel, he was going to initiate a chronicle of the decadence of the Peruvian society in a series of novels so The city and the dogs inaugurates this cycle.
- The author was aspiring with these first works to construct a total novel, of sophisticated architecture and a variety of interlaced histories.

Of his work:
- It is one of the most typical expressions of this moment of renovation in the Spanish-American novel-writing that is known as " the boom ".
- Modern Realism: though he is modernist in the form but not in the background; he does not use the omniscient narrator due to his own characters tell their stories.
- Approximation to the modal: He creates a minimal distance between the universe of fiction and the daily life, confusing the reader.
- "New novel": There is a wider conception of the reality that includes the interior world (the subconscious, the oneiric and reflexive one)
- The novel helps to be aware of the consequences of the authoritarian militarism, by means of a series of general topics, associated with the adolescence, it presents a deep and reflexive analysis of Peru.
- Vargas Llosa is critical in this work with the military form of life and culture, where there are promoted certain values (aggressiveness, valor, manliness, sexuality ...) that mutilate seriously the personal development of the boys of this school, and they were turning out to be already anachronistic when he wrote this work in the year 1963.
- The end of the story, comes to express the senseless and unreasonableness in wich the community of boys moves
- The city and the dogs offers a reflection, not exempt of irony, on education. The incident of the cadets shows that it is impossible to break the shell and to leave the infancy without violence. Theoretically, the school system is thought to form the individual, sculpt the rock and do a statue. Nevertheless when this system develops into oppression, the pupil does not have another remedy than to forge himself, breaking the procedures and laws. In this titanic labor, the dog resorts to the trickery and the brutality. What stays at the end of this lucid work is a desolated singing to the individualism.

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