La presencia constante de la muerte en la novelística de Miguel Delibes

Abstract

Most critics recognize that childhood, fellowship, nature, and death are recurrent literary motifs in Miguel Delibes's work. However, it is the author's obsession with death that determines the essence of his novelistic plots. This article analyzes, precisely, this thematic recurrence from both quantitative and, most of all, qualitative points of view: quantitatively, it is not a trivial matter that in his twenty-six novels, death is explicitly mentioned three hundred seventy-four times; qualitatively, Delibes's work cannot be understood without finding death always hidden behind the main framework of the narrative. Even in his literary works in which death does not have a central role, the storyline depends so heavily on this motif that the narrative would not be possible without death's presence. Childhood, fellowship, and nature are secondary themes, which are sometimes even unessential in Delibes's writing; by contrast, death is the constant toward which all his novels gravitate. Without the fundamental presence of death, Delibes's work would not be feasible.