Analysis of the armies by Evelio Rosero: a view from the subjectivity of violence

Pérez Rojas, Nelson | 2021

This monograph aims to make an analysis of the novel The armies, by Evelio Rosero, a novel that tells the story of Ismael Pasos, an 80-year-old teacher who worked in the small towns of Colombia until he reached San José. There Ismael resides with his wife Otilia and he stands out not only for having taught to read and write to most of the people of the town, but in his old age he also becomes that distant spectator who narrates in a typified, normalized way, and almost natural, the violent events, the traumas and the culture of violence created by the conflicts between legal and illegal armed groups. In order to show the impact and some effects of the state abandonment that the novel exposes, it is intended to relate some violent events that occurred in Colombia with the situations that take place in San José. Likewise, in this work it will be found the concept of Empathic Unsettlement, a term proposed by the American professor and historian Dominick LaCapra (2001), as the literary resource that the writer used when deciding how to tell his novel. It should be emphasized that Rosero did not experience violence directly, however, he takes the necessary experience for the narrator from the information published in the different media. Key words: historical memory, empathic unsettlement, violence, normalization of violence, The armies.