Literary influence and author's technique in Mario Vargas Llosa's novel "The Time of the Hero"

Abstract

The novel "The Time of the Hero" by the Peruvian Nobel laureate, Mario Vargas Llosa, is the firstborn of the Latin American Boom. Vargas Llosa, the last representative of the Boom, broke the model of naturalistic representation of description and gained an aesthetic independence stimulated by the European experience and the discovery of innovative forms of narration. Three worlds are depicted in his works: a logical world, a game between fiction and reality, and reality that turns into fiction, into literary creation. His narrative is characterized by technical experiments, complex syntax and different forms of narration, which are manifested in the variety of narrative focus, the breakdown of chronology, interior monologue, the manner of urban narration and the ambiguous character of the characters, which are clearly expressed in his first novel “The Time of the Hero”. His style is also called Vargas Llosa’s style. Vargas Llosa offers us a space where the lexical heritage of Peru can be seen in different registers of the language: everyday colloquial vocabulary, regionalisms and slang. Using modernist techniques, Vargas Liosa blurs the boundaries between fiction and everyday life and turns this mixture into a new reality. As was typical of the Latin American Boom, “The Time of the Hero” represented a departure from traditional literature. Latin American writers of the previous generation used simple artistic forms to present realistic and social aspects, but Mario Vargas Llosa chose innovative forms and structures of narration to present the mentioned circumstances, he used the voices of the characters to give the story an intimate and psychological look. Using modernist techniques, the author wants to show us the inner world of the characters, their thoughts and feelings, which consists in jumping from one place to another, from one moment to another, from one character to another. That is why the description of naturalistic language of the characters and their sexual inclinations gains fundamental importance from the point of view of the technique. Vargas Llosa wanted to express the disorganization and spontaneity of the human mind in the narrative, that's why he jumps from topic to topic by means of strange connections and allows the reader to be the co-author of the narrative, because according to the author, the work takes its finished form only in the reader's mind. By bringing to the fore the various problems of the characters, such as the level of education, customs, vocabulary, violent treatment, manners, symbolism, existential crisis, etc., the author further increases the level of reality and allows the reader to easily perceive the objective reality.