The Chaco War as a Thematic in the Novel Hijo de Hombre by Augusto Roa Bastos

Abstract

The Chaco War was the main war in America during the twentieth century. From 1932 to 1935 successive battles were fought between the two armies, where heroic acts by both contenders stood out, resulting in the death of around 50,000 Bolivians and 35,000 Paraguayans. The Chaco War was an event that marked the history of both countries and that was reflected in different aspects of the cultural life of the country giving rise to various works that had as background the Chaco conflict, including the novel. The Chaco War is really the historical-geographic scenario of the work Hijo de Hombre by Augusto Roa Bastos, without forgetting the memories of the War against the Triple Alliance, where there are issues directly related to this armed conflict, such as the enlistment, the battles, the physical and spiritual sacrifices of the soldiers during the war, as well as the aftermath of the war. Accounts of events and internal targeting allow us to observe what happens between combatants on the battlefront. The historical knowledge of the Chaco War, in conjunction with its geographical description turns the narrative into a landscape of situations that lead the reader and allow him to distinguish the areas where events occur. Roa Bastos's conjunction of time-space elements in his work underscores the suffering of Paraguayan society during the war and the characters of this novel, allow us, in a way, to reconstruct the context of war and avatars that crossed the Paraguayan society during the fateful War of the Chaco.