A Hero's Irony, Analyzed

          Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps narrates the story of a unique hero struggling to find happiness by gallivanting with women other than his wife, returning to his love of music, and transitioning from city to rural living. The author incorporates many literary techniques to encourage his readers to connect with the main character. For instance, he does not mention the names of the character’s locations in hope that his readers will be able to relate better, picturing the narrator in a location they are knowledgeable about. One important literary technique Carpentier introduces is irony through the narrator’s wish of having a baby with Rosario yet returning home to pregnant Ruth, his wife that he no longer loves and through the narrator’s rediscovered desire to write music in a wild setting yet there is no purpose or proper writing materials for the extent of his imagination.

The narrator develops a husband and wife relationship with a native named Rosario. She is a woman that he meets during his travels. Disregarding his marriage, “for the first time [he] felt the longing to caress a child”, birthed by Rosario, “to hold it in my arms, and watch its knees bend over my arm, and see it suck its fingers” (230). Readers discover the irony behind his statement once he returns home by plane to his actual wife who informs him that she is, “going to be a mother” (242). Readers understand the narrator’s negative view of Ruth’s pregnancy when he says, “there was no doubt that my situation was now worse, from a moral point of view, with this matter of pregnancy” (243). He “asked her if it was true that she was pregnant” (249) in hope that it was not the truth because he wishes to divorce Ruth to eventually marry and build a family with Rosario. Although “the pregnancy turned out to be a false alarm” (256), this ironic situation magnifies the narrator’s secret life involving women other than his wife and that fact that he never feels satisfied for a long period of time with the same woman.

Another instance in the novel where Carpentier incorporates irony is though the narrator’s decision to begin writing music in the wild setting yet right when his ideas fully develop his imagination become limited by the lack of paper. Prior to running into the Curator, the narrator felt that nobody “could make a living today from the study of primitive musical instruments” (21). Therefore, while he was in the city he distanced himself from the study of music for so long that when he “tried to take refuge in bibliographical references” he learned that his knowledge was so out of date that “specialists had already disregarded them” (21). He decided to rediscover his desire to study music in a rural setting that does not even have paper and ink while; ironically, he used to live in a city that had all the proper materials to write at his exposure and an audience who would appreciate his musical research. Prior to traveling to the rural setting, the narrator “became engulfed in the senseless activities that made [him] forget [his] composing” (214) but it was the sounds of the “river inhabited by monsters” (216), the howling of the medicine man, and the actions of the captives that caused his musical idea of Threnody to grow. However, both Frey Pedro and Adelantado tried to convince him that there was no need for his musical writings in the rural setting, offering Marco’s guitar as a replacement.

Overall, the author includes irony in his writing through the narrator’s wish of having a baby with Rosario yet returning home to pregnant Ruth and through the narrator’s rediscovered desire to write music in a wild setting yet he does not have proper writing materials, giving the main character more depth and interest to readers. Irony is an underlying theme that can be discovered after analyzing the narrator’s setting, thoughts, and observations in The Lost Steps.