Sismología en La Fiesta del Chivo de Mario Vargas Llosa: Heteroglosia en la Narración del Trauma

Rafael Leonidas 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, Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa 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 him the night of May 30th 1961.
My study analyzes the complex narrative structures 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.