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The Labyrinth of Solitude

Octavio Paz' The Labyrinth of Solitude is a literary quest for the identity of Mexico and the Mexican people. It is a soul-searching experience: enlightening, universal and passionate - the kind of reading which is very difficult to put aside once started. Octavio Paz takes the reader through the history of Mexico - and the world - with remarkable intensity and speed. His extremely human approach to independence, revolution, war, customs, religions, economy, and other aspects of national life make this book unusual and fascinating. This human approach also opens boundaries: although Octavio Paz is writing exclusively through the perspective of Mexican experience, one can easily imagine any other member of the global community finding questions and answers to their problems of identity as a people.

The body of The Labyrinth of Solitude consists of nine essays produced on or before 1961.* Many of these essays were written as independent articles and, although Paz' writes in Spanish, some were produced directly for the English-language magazines Dissent and The New Yorker. Despite the fact that these essays are more a compilation than a deliberately-structured work of nonfiction analysis, all are connected as with an umbilical cord by the same underlying question: What is a Mexican? In examining the answers to that question - and, indeed, examining the question itself - Octavio Paz attempts to avoid what he terms "the pitfalls of abstract humanism and illusions of a philosophy of Mexican-ness: the mask that changes into a face, the petrified face that changes into a mask" (216). He is, instead, trying to discover what lies under the "Mexican mask," because, "the Mexican ... seems to me to be a person who shuts himself away to protect himself: his face is a mask and so is his smile" (29).

The essays in The Labyrinth of Solitude are intensively filled with information. Once the Mexican "mask" is lifted, more questions...

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The Labyrinth of Solitude. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:58, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1702503.html