Like the Night by Alejo Carpentier

First published: "Semejante a la noche," 1958 (English translation, 1970)

Type of plot: Magical Realism

Time of work: From the Trojan War through World War II

Locale: Greece, Spain, and France

Principal Characters:

• The narrator, the unnamed protagonist, a young soldier about to leave by ship for warfare
• His fiancé, unnamed

The Story

The events of the story occur in a single day, but it is a day that takes more than two thousand years to be completed. The main character, who is also the narrator, is going through an ancient ritual for young men: leaving his homeland for war and conquest. In this traditional situation, the narrator undergoes several obligatory encounters. He says farewell to each of his parents, his fiancé, and friends; gets drunk on his final evening at home, then boards the boat in the cold light of day to leave his country.

Alejo Carpentier divides the story into five numbered sections, each of which advances the action while transposing it to a different place and time. The movement of the story is circular, however, beginning with the preparations for the Trojan War in section 1, moving to phases of the Spanish exploration and conquest of the New World in sections 2 and 3, and to a sort of hybrid of World War I and World War II in sections 4 and in section 5 returning to the initial scene.

A note blown on a conch announces the arrival of King Agamemnon's fifty black ships, come to take the Achaean troops to Troy. Instantly, as if that note were the beginning of a vast symphony, the scene comes noisily to life. Those who had been waiting for many days begin to carry the wheat toward the ships, the ships scrape the sand with their keels, the Mycenaean sailors try to keep the Achaeans away from the ships with poles, and children run about, hindering the soldiers' movements and stealing nuts from under the oarsmen's benches.

The narrator finds the scene disillusioning. He expected a solemn ceremony celebrating the meeting of two groups of warriors, not this pandemonium in which the leading citizens could not make their speeches of welcome. He withdraws from the beach and sits astride a tree branch because it reminds him of a woman's body. The sexual theme, here a consolation for his vague sense of disappointment, will later become a source of frustration for him. The suggestion of disappointment is readily dispelled, however, by attributing it both to fatigue from waiting all night and to a hangover. His pride and sense of superiority return when he reflects that he and the other soldiers are the occasion of all this activity. He scorns the peasants for spending the day looking "at the earth over the sweating backs of their animals," or working the earth hunched over like cattle themselves. He tells himself that they will never see Troy, the city he and his comrades are about to "surround, attack, and destroy."

His ferocity is fueled by messages—which will ultimately be revealed as lies and propaganda—sent by Agamemnon about the Trojan King Priam's "insolence," the taunts that the Trojans have made against the Achaeans' "manly way of life," and the cruelties that the abducted Helen of Sparta suffered in Troy. He believes that to rescue Helen will be a "manly undertaking and the supreme triumph of a war that would give us prosperity, happiness, and pride in ourselves forever." His optimism is tempered only by the thought of giving grief to his mother and father.

In section 2, the noise about the ships changes to music from guitars and cymbals, and the sound of people dancing the zarambeque and singing coplas. The wheat being loaded in the previous section is now accompanied by wine, oil, and a wooden pipe organ to help convert the Indians of the New World. The narrator is about to depart to conquer a new empire for Spain, and the soldiers' arrogance infects him as it did previously. He feels that he and his fellows are men different from ordinary men by nature and capable of deeds unimaginable to them. His father's praise of a peaceful and prosperous life, then, is to no avail, and though he again feels a sense of disillusionment when his father warns him that such expeditions were the "madness of many for the gain of a few," he takes leave of his father and mother with the buoyant promise that, by freeing the Indians "from their barbarous superstitions our nation would win imperishable glory and greater happiness, prosperity, and power than all the Kingdoms of Europe." His idealism is undercut, however, in the scene with his mother, in which she warns him to have no sinful dealings with the Indian women but then realizes that her son is already dreaming of trying what she has warned him against. The base motives for his adventure give the lie to the narrator's idealism even before he articulates it.

Ultimately he sees through the propaganda, his own false idealism and sexual bravado. That disillusionment takes place in the final three sections of the story, in which he argues with his fiancé (section 3), angrily leaves her to visit his mistress (section 4), and returns to his fiancé, who is ready to give herself to him (section 5). By then he is sexually exhausted and filled with a tremendous fear of failure. Insulted by his weak refusal of her body, she flees. He is left emasculated and demoralized, his soldier's pride changed to self-reproach and disgust. His motive for heroism is debased. He is in the end merely a foot soldier, traveling on a slow, overloaded boat, and he will not see his loved ones for many years, if ever.