Carlos Fuentes

 I read The Old Gringo this week. The novel’s content mainly revolves around the feelings and cultural conflicts of the three protagonists, Harriet Winslow, Tomas Arroyo and Ambrose Bierce (The Old Gringo). At the beginning of the novel, we meet Harriet Winslow, quietly thinking. So the author uses Winslow’s perspective to describe everything that happened before in flashbacks. Ambrose Bierce (known in the novel as Old Gringo) is a journalist from the United States. While working for his employer, he constantly used his reporting to complete the task of attacking others. Still, when he continued to use sharp words to expose In the dark society, his relationship with his wife and children also drifted away. Finally, because of his reports, his two sons committed suicide. So Ambrose Bierce began to get tired of being a journalist. He vowed not to write again and came to Mexico to die. On the way to Mexico, he met Tomas Arroyo. Tomas Arroyo, a colonel of the Mexican rebels, took a document he didn’t understand as evidence of his revolution and led revolutionaries through Mexican soil. The two then met Harriet Winslow, who came to teach in a pre-revolutionary landowner’s estate and began an emotional entanglement. In this emotional tragedy, Bierce was shot by Arroyo, who was also killed by the general’s execution at Winslow’s whistleblower.

There are many repeated sentences in the novel. The “now she sits alone and remembers” at the beginning reappears at the end, making people feel that the whole story of the book has become a memory, which only exists in the memory of the heroine and is buried in one corner of history, and the other two in the story. The male protagonist has also been deeply buried in the soil. And the heroine returned to the United States like a lonely fire passer with this memory that will eventually be forgotten. And another sentence in the novel: “he came here to die.” also keeps appearing in various scenes. Arroyo’s first conversation with the soldier sounded like contempt and disdain for the old gringo. After Gringo showed his prowess and gained recognition, the phrase seemed like a nod to the future of his death on the battlefield. When this sentence appears in Arroyo and Winslow’s conversation, it’s like an excuse for Arroyo to persuade Winslow to give up Bierce. This sentence represents the admiral’s evaluation of this American from a foreign land and emphasizes the purpose of Bierce’s coming to Mexico, and implies the fate of old gringo’s death. Although in the end, old gringo did not die in a glorious battle, but died at Arroyo’s gun after burning Arroyo’s documents and was killed again from the front by the general’s orders. His death wasn’t as complicated as I thought when I first read it, just as Arroyo’s death wasn’t supposed to be so easy.

Much of the novel also shows the cultural and historical conflict between the two countries. The United States had invaded Mexico, which caused the Mexican revolutionaries to be unfriendly to old foreigners at first. There is an important border between them, the creek between the United States and Mexico. They have a hard time understanding each other’s culture. For the first time, the Mexican revolutionaries saw itself in the mirror of the landlord’s estate, and Winslow from the United States could dance in this ballroom. Winslow aspires to teach native English but is questioned about its usefulness. Not to mention that at a later stage, the general in Mexico couldn’t even understand some of the United States’ laws and shot two people a second time to comply with the rules and bury the truth. This cultural divide adds to the sense of borders between the two Americans in the Mexican revolutionaries, and it’s no wonder that two lonely strangers are drawn to each other.

My question for this novel is: Why is there so much physical detail added later in the article when describing Arroyo and Winslow’s love? Do these details help explain the overall vibe of the relationship?