Octavio Paz' "The Labyrinth of Solitude"

He is, instead, trying to mention what lies under the "Mexican mask," because, "the Mexican ... seems to me to be a someone 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, much questions arise, more issues emerge. Unless one possesses the literary skill of Paz himself - and this book is nonhing if not an example of excellent writing - it is impossible to address them each(prenominal) with the same economy of expression the author employs. Nevertheless, from the wealth of square presented, certain recurrent themes appear to interweave themselves among the essays as for the first time in Paz' thoughts:

1. The solitude of the gayity in and throughout chronicle.

2. account as a set of circumstances related to to human behavior.

3. Revolution as a backward, not forward, movement.

For Octavio Paz, solitude is the score and experience of life. It is interwoven into almost either social and economical problem; it is an integral part of history itself. "Death and affinity are solitary experiences. We are born alone and we fracture alone" (196). This is the ending Paz reaches near the end of The Labyrinth of Solitude, an arrangement he comes to only as a result of exploring the particulars of the Mexican experiences of life

Octavio Paz' The Labyrinth of Solitude is a literary quest. As with most quests, the journey is episodic in structure and epic in breadth. The question "What is a Mexican?" opens the door to many avenues of thought, most of them without a final conclusion. Which is as it should be: in a quest, the journey becomes the raison d'etre, the elusive closing a mere excuse for travelling stark roads. The dangerous roads in The Labyrinth of Solitude all stalk from this proposition: that the question "What is a Mexican?" asks, finally, "What is a human being?" Octavio Paz uses the concept of solitude and the image of the mask to confine his journeys through this line of inquiry.

It is a journey not hold to Mexicans:

The past has left us orphans, as it has the rest of the planet, and we essential join together in inventing our common future. World history has become everyone's task, and our own labyrinth is the labyrinth of all adult male (173).

Everything in the modern world functions as if remnant did not exist. Nobody takes it into account, it is suppressed everywhere: in political pronouncements, mercenary advertising, public morality and popular customs ... But death enters into everything we undertake, and it is no longer a transition but a great gaping mouth that nothing can quit (57).

While Octavio Paz observes that history is a set of circumstances related to human behavior, he uses that observation to support a conclusion that transmutation is a backward, not forward, movement. Paz reviews the circumstances that led to the retell humiliation of the Mexican. He concludes that this humiliation was the cause of the Mexican's need for revolution: from Spain in the 1820s, from France in the 1860s, from the dictatorship of Porfirio Dfaz in the 1910s. In every case, he finds, the revolutionaries were not fighting for a boldly-imagined new future, but, rather, pursuit some imagined golden age from the past. Although Paz uses Mexico as his negative
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