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Manuel Puig's novel Kiss of the Spider Woman

In Manuel Puig's novel Kiss of the Spider Woman, two men share a cell in a Buenos Aires prison. One is Molina, a homosexual sentenced to eight years in prison for the corruption of minors, and the other is Valentfn, a young Marxist imprisoned for revolutionary activities. Molina tries to pass the time by telling the younger man about films he has seen, recreating the stories with words. It is in the course of these retellings of the different films that the reader gets to know these characters an sees how they develop as they interact with one another and with the images recalled from films by Molina. In the course of the novel, the two men become much closer, developing a friendship they would be unlikely to have in the "real" world outside of prison. The setting is artificial in that it brings together two people from different class backgrounds and with very different views of the world, holds them together over a long period of time, and leads to a rapprochement that might never take place in the outside world.

Most of the novel is presented as a dialogue between the two men, and they reveal themselves in their own words. The true nature of their being cell mates is revealed in the middle of the novel. Until that point, the reader sees the two men as precisely what they say they are--two men imprisoned for quite different crimes and merely happening to be in the same cell and trying to make the best of it. In Chapter 8, the reader learns that this is not true and that Molina was deliberately planted in the cell to gather information. Molina is indeed a prisoner, but he is trying to win his release by finding out what he can about the terrorist group from which Valentfn has come. The reader is forced at this point to reconsider everything that Molina has said, in essence to reconsider those words to see if they have had a double meaning or if more of Molina is revealed in these words than one might have ben able to se...

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Manuel Puig's novel Kiss of the Spider Woman. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 04:50, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1689814.html