The Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa

First published:La ciudad y los perros, 1962 (English translation, 1966)

Type of plot: Rites of passage

Time of work: The 1950’s

Locale: The military academy Leoncio Prado in Lima, Peru

Principal Characters:

• Alberto (the Poet), the bourgeois intellectual of the group
• Jaguar, the leader of “the Circle,” a tough boy of lower-class origins
• Ricardo Arana (the Slave), the group’s whipping boy
• Boa, the sexual role model of the Circle
• Lieutenant Gamboa, the dutiful officer in charge of discipline in the school
• Teresa, a young woman loved by Alberto, Ricardo, and Jaguar who finally marries Jaguar

The Novel

Based in part on Vargas Llosa’s experience as a cadet in the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, Peru, from 1950 to 1952, The Time of the Hero is a fictionalized portrayal of a group of adolescent boys at the school during a three-year period which coincides, roughly, with the author’s own stay there.

The Time of the Hero is divided into two parts, of eight chapters each, and an epilogue. It has four narrators: an omniscient third-person narrator; two first-person narrators, Jaguar and Boa, whose identity is discovered only in the last part of the book; and a fourth voice, that of Alberto, who communicates with the reader through several internal monologues.

The book begins during the boys’ third and last year at the school. They are there for various reasons. Alberto’s father, a middle-class dandy, somewhat dismayed at his son’s interest in books, decides that what the young man needs is an education that will prepare him for adult life in the real world; the Leoncio Prado, the father believes, will do precisely that. Ricardo Arana is there because his absentee father considers him effeminate; the boy has been reared by a devoted mother and an aunt, and the father insists that he is in need of the discipline and toughening that a military education can provide. Jaguar, who comes from a family of thieves and is a budding juvenile delinquent, ends up in the academy as an alternative to reform school after he is caught stealing. As the novel begins, an omniscient third-person narrator relates how several boys are about to carry out a carefully planned maneuver designed by Jaguar, the undisputed leader of the school’s student gang known as “the Circle.” Their aim is to steal an important chemistry exam. They succeed in getting the exam but break a window in the process, thus exposing the theft. Pending the discovery or confession of the guilty parties, school authorities suspend all leaves.

The severing of the lifeline with the outside world becomes the catalyst for the novel; it tests the partnerships, relationships, and loyalties that had been established and upon which the Circle was built and impels the characters to act in ways which express their true nature. Ricardo Arana, “the Slave,” so called because of his lack of aggressiveness and courage as defined by the other boys, cannot bear giving up his plan to get away from the school and the boys whom he detests and visit his beloved Teresa. He informs and thus breaks the honor code of the Circle. He is subsequently wounded by a bullet during the school’s military exercises. He dies shortly thereafter. Following a superficial investigation of the incident, school authorities conclude, wrongly, that the Slave’s death was caused by the accidental firing of the victim’s own gun.

Alberto, “the Poet,” Ricardo’s only friend among the cadets, is certain that Ricardo’s death was not an accident but rather Jaguar’s revenge against the Slave for informing. The Poet, in turn, informs Lieutenant Gamboa of his suspicions about Jaguar and takes advantage of the opportunity to expose all the petty infractions and violations of the regulations carried out by the group: the gambling, drinking, illegal furloughs, and contraband. While Gamboa believes Alberto, he is unable to persuade his superiors to reopen the case. They are concerned about the good name of the school and the bad publicity that a full investigation might attract. They urge Alberto to withdraw his accusations, threatening to expose him as a pornographer, a reference to Alberto’s sideline as a writer of erotic tales. Alberto succumbs and withdraws his charges. The lieutenant, in turn, is transferred to a distant post, a plan that causes him and his beloved family great hardship. He accepts the transfer with true dignity, which serves to highlight the contrast between the corruption of the upper echelons of the military hierarchy and the naive honesty of its more humble ranks. Alberto himself also becomes an informer when he tells Gamboa the truth about Jaguar. As for the leader of the Circle, his own comrades turn on him, give him a severe beating, and accuse him, falsely, of having revealed the details of their illegal rackets.

The epilogue of the work serves to tie lose ends. Alberto, feeling no guilt over his retreat from responsibility, plans to pursue technical studies in the United States and will eventually marry a suitable middle-class young woman. Jaguar confesses about the shooting to Gamboa before the lieutenant leaves the school; the latter decides not to expose him. Jaguar also becomes “respectable.” He works at a bank and marries his childhood sweetheart Teresa, the same Teresa who had moved Ricardo to inform, setting off the chain of events described above, and who, at the same time, had been romanticaly ensnarled in a relationship with Alberto behind the Slave’s back.

The Characters

Alberto the Poet captures the sympathy of the reader at the beginning of the book. A thinker rather than a doer, he must survive through his intelligence and wit in the rough school environment. He nevertheless proves disappointing in the end. He reveals the Circle’s secrets presumably to avenge his friend Ricardo’s death; he then, however, withdraws all charges—making it possible for school officials to close the investigation—revealing a selfish and cowardly nature. Alberto also disenchants the reader when he befriends and romances Teresa, whom he visits to deliver a message from her boyfriend, the Slave, who is unable to make the rendezvous in person because he has been grounded. The role of the bourgeois intellectual, the novel suggests, is to take the easy way out even if it means, as in this case, to be a traitor.

Jaguar, a petty thief and delinquent, impresses the reader with his strength, and with his control and leadership over the other boys. When he kills the Slave, he does so to protect the honor code of the Circle; yet, ironically, he is punished in the end not by the system itself but by his fellow cadets. Jaguar emerges as the only cadet with a firm set of laudable values and a willingness to suffer for the sake of a principle. At the end of the novel he rehabilitates himself, marries, and begins a life of middle-class respectability.

Ricardo the Slave is the professional victim, serving as prey even to his best friend, Alberto. His reactions, and even his fate, are somewhat predictable, insofar as he serves as the scapegoat for all that is wrong or goes wrong within the school. He is not, however, without some redeeming nobility. He informs, not because he is a coward and wants revenge against his abusers but because he wants to be away from the school, even for a short time, to see Teresa, who has shown him tenderness and humanity.

Gamboa, the rigid disciplinarian and stoic good soldier is, deep down, a decent, just, and loving individual, devoted to his family and to the best ideals of a military life. The book reveals, nevertheless, that there is no room for such individuals in the army, except in some remote region of the country where they cannot threaten the system or, even inadvertently, expose the corruption within it.

Teresa, the only developed female character of the novel, has no distinct personality and is not a very believable human being. In fact, she seems to exist, in part, to join and perhaps equalize emotionally the three principal characters of the novel, Alberto, Jaguar, and the Slave, and to serve as the desirable “nice girl” counterpoint in the otherwise rather raunchy sexual fantasies of the adolescent boys.

Critical Context

The Time of the Hero, Vargas Llosa’s first full-length novel, was also his first commercial success. The book was published when the author was not yet thirty, yet its favorable reception by critics and public alike placed Vargas Llosa—along with Julio Cortázar and Carlos Fuentes—in the mainstream of the exciting wave of Latin American fiction of the 1960’s and 1970’s known as the “Boom.” In this novel the author experiments, rather successfully, with a number of literary techniques; he uses multiple narrators, flashbacks, fragmented time sequences, introspective monologues, breaks in the structure of the narration, all of which contribute to make this book a complex work of literature whose story line is that of a rather simple Bildungsroman. Although the figure of the writer appears in this novel, represented by the Poet, Vargas Llosa has not yet begun to explore the role of the writer in the creation of reality and the relationship between reality and fiction, themes that will become central to some of his future celebrated novels, such as La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1982) and La guerra del fin del mundo (1981; The War of the End of the World, 1984).

Vargas Llosa has also been a prolific writer outside the area of fiction. He has established a reputation as an erudite and respected literary critic and has been a frequent contributor to important news and cultural publications throughout the world. He has become one of the most important novelists, in any language, of the last quarter of the twentieth century and a most likely recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Bibliography

Booker, M. Keith. Vargas Llosa Among the Postmodernists. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. A thorough examination of Vargas Llosa’s works from a postmodern point of view. Includes a comparison of modernism and postmodernism, as well as extensive notes.

Castro-Klarén, Sara. “Mario Vargas Llosa.” In Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria I. Abreau. Vol 3. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. Offers a comprehensive and critical discussion of Vargas Llosa’s life and works. Provides a selected bibliography for further reading.

Gerdes, Dick. “Mario Vargas Llosa.” In Spanish American Authors: The Twentieth Century, edited by Angel Flores. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1992. Profiles Vargas Llosa and includes an extensive bibliography of works by and about the author.

Kristal, Efrain. Temptation of the Word: The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998. A collection of perceptive essays on Vargas Llosa’s novels written from the 1960s through the 1980s. A helpful bibliography for further reading is also included.