Mario Vargas Llosa and The Feast of the Goat: Heteroglossic Trauma

Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1891-1961), the ruthless Dominican Republic ruler dominated his island’s politics for over thirty years. In his acclaimed 2000 novel, The Feast of the Goat, Nobel laureate, Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian who has written about Latin American dictators, creates Urania Cabral, a 49-year-old émigrée who at 14 left her nation after becoming Trujillo’s sexual victim. The novel, told from many perspectives, focuses on her return, the dictator’s last day, and the story of the four conspirators waiting to ambush the presidential bullet-proof car on that fateful night of May 30th 1961. My study analyzes the complex narrative structures (Bakhtin’s heteroglossia) of the novel as masterful “rupturing” techniques. Through these, the reader pieces together the broken body politic of a traumatized nation as Urania reconstructs in painful detail how the impotent dictator digitally rapes her to ensure her body bears the mark of his brutal anger and frustration.