Eroicitate discretă sau discreție eroică? Avataruri eroice în Eroul discret al lui Mario Vargas Llosa
Discreet Heroism or Heroic Discreetness? Heroic Stances in Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Discreet Hero

Summary/Abstract: The author of the contribution at hand takes it upon herself to shed significant light on a set of idiosyncratic patterns as exhibited by the heroes and antiheroes of Mario Vargas Llosa’s latest novel, The Discreet Hero. In so doing, she has ample recourse to hermeneutical strategies, which she more effectively deploys with a threefold focus in mind: on mythical-historical Greco-Roman, mythical-symbolical Pre-Columbian and archetypal Christian legacies, respectively. By closely charting the way symbols pattern in the diegetic layer, the present paper shifts the zoom lens from vice to virtue, and while theoretically addressing the issue of exemplary conduct, it actually features a fine array of civic as well as everyday discreet heroes who, though, in a genuinely quixotic fashion, well past their prime, do not have to die before being proclaimed as such. On the contrary, defying all canons, they are allowed to live on and pass down the “perfectly” ordinary features underlying their heroism.

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