The religious and spiritual symbolism in Anaya’s book, Bless Me, Ultima blend beautifully with the powerfully described New Mexican setting and culture that surround the novel’s main charatcer, Antonio, and place him at the center of a series of thematic struggles including the classic struggle of good vs. evil, the difficult decision of choosing between one’s apparent destiny and giving in to one’s choices, and the intense discovery and formation of alternate beliefs in a higher being.
Anaya places Antonio in a Catholic household of Mexican descent in the rural setting of Las Pastures, New Mexico; illustrating the natural beauty and land-based lifestyle that Antonio grows up knowing. Tony’s mother is a faithful and passionate Catholic, believing in the imporatance of direct prayer to God and the adoration of the Virgin Mary. She sees and feels the holyness that surrounds Tony’s being from his birth, and raises him in hopes that he will some day become a priest. The characterization of Tony’s father provides a nice contrast that lends an insight into the formation of Tony. His father is a man of the land, using it respectfully and living in symbiance with it to ensure the heathly lifespans of both his family, and his family’s land or llano. The contrast in Tony’s parental upbringing sets the stage for his future conflicts concerning the true existance of a God, and the reasons for the existance of good and evil that he witnesses in life.
The Essay on Understanding Of Life Tony Antonio God
The Man-Child A child is much like a far-reaching scientific experiment. Both are expensive and in constant need of attention. Nevertheless, an experiment can be terminated at anytime. The experiment of child cannot be aborted, and sometimes the Experiment fails when he or she chooses the wrong path. However, for Rudolfo Anaya's 'Experiment Antonio' of Bless Me, Ultima, the results are promising. ...
Symbolism is a cetral tool that Anaya uses to artistically convey Tony’s journey and his discoveries, amazments, and disappointments along the way. Perhaps most finely crafted is Anaya’s creation of the golden carp, used to represent the startling effect of peace and joy that Tony feels after discovering its existance. The golden carp itself is a symbol of an alternate idol of worship besides the Christian God that Tony had grown to believe in through the teachings he recives at home, school, and at church. The fact that Tony is willing to belive in the golden carp’s existance, as he is both amazed and mystified by its beauty, is made to appear especially surprising through the description is the things that Tony is denying in order give into the peace and happines he feels in the golden carp.
At one point, Tony is at sunday school at church, and the priest is describing to the students the concept of an eternity. An eternity, he proceeds to explain, is the amount of time it would take a bird to pick up every grain of sand on a beach, one by one, and fly it across the pacific ocean to deposit on a shore in Japan. And then, when the entire beach has been transported, he does it again, and brings every grain to the other side, a million times. That’s how long an eternity is, and that’s how long you will stay in heaven or in hell. This concept frightened me like a week ago, I can imagine how it might affect an eleven year old boy. Yet, the beauty of the golden carp, and the balance that it’s existance creates within Tony is more than enough to allow him to betray the doctrine he has been taught to believe in and risk finding out the hard way exactly how long an eternity is.
The book’s symbolism is far deeper than what I can describe in this review, and it includes themes like free will vs. destiny that I have not mentioned. Overall I can say it is a beautifully written book, with easy to recognize parallels to the inner-turnmoil of the reader, and I recommend reading it at least twice to truly appreciate the ideas and messages conveyed in Anaya’s novel.
