Major Characters: Manuel, Angela and Lazaro
Illusion versus Reality & Life Motivation
Future-Think versus Here-and-Now Reality
Embracing Life in the Face of Reality
Meaning Through Illusion Perpetuation
DIFFERENT ILLUSIONS FOR DIFFERENT PEOPLES
In studying de Unamuno’s San Manuel Bueno, we are provided with a story unique for its era. The story is unique because the hero who exists a century ago is seen as one with a dual consciousness, one that tolerates and promotes Christian ideology on the surface, but one who understands absolutely underneath the challenge of the existential dilemma-finding meaning in a reality that one is only born into as an organic animal destined to die. In other words, even though Manuel accepts we are alone in the universe, and that there is no conscious reality after death, he promotes as a priest the opposite to his opiated flock of simple, uneducated folk. Obviously this story comes from an author who was torn between his educated beliefs in existentialism and his environmental repression of those beliefs through the social ideology of Christianity.
In the story we have three main characters and one significant minor character. The three main characters are Manuel, who preaches and comforts his people in accordance with the illusions he knows makes their lives more bearable, but he also knows they are illusions only. We have Lazaro, the only other individual who can accept the “horrible” truth of mortal life being the “only life”, an individual who must come to understand why Manuel’s duality is not hypocritical. The third main character is Angela, the narrator, who is devoted to the words and deeds of Manuel, but who is not as educated or consciously aware as Lazaro or Manuel and must retain her illusions, even though she is capable of at least hearing the truth, something the simple townfolk, if they did hear, would not accept. Finally, the fool, Blasillo, is a...