60 pages • 2 hours read
Sandra BenitezThe Weight of All Things
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaThemes
The Injustice of War
Nicolás and Tata represent the common El Salvadoran. Both the Left and the Right claim they are fighting for the benefit of all El Salvadorans. Yet, the war brings nothing but destruction to the Veras family. Beforehand, they are poor, but live well enough on the land Tata owns. They are happy enough together living on the crops they grow and fish they catch. Their village provides a church, community, and school for Nicolás. When the war breaks out, their basic accommodations are taken away, one after another. Neither the Left nor the Right takes more from them; it is their position as people stuck between two warring sides that makes their life difficult. Tata often remarks that he is no revolutionary, only stuck: “It was the story of his life: caught always in between” (200). They are in constant danger and are exploited by both sides of the war. After Nicolás is shot, he states, “It was either the army or the guerrillas. In the end, they’re all the same” (192). His unique experience living with the guerrilleros and then at the Army garrison gives him the clarity to see that there is no difference between the sides. Both are using the common people as pawns in their war, and both are causing those same people enormous destruction and pain.
As the novel develops, it becomes clear that the greatest destruction is felt by the people who have nothing to do with the war. Gerardo’s mother loses all of her children and an unborn grandchild to the fighting. Meanwhile she is left alone in her home with no protection or family. Nicolás loses his mother and his home, simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Death becomes an everyday occurrence for people who are not even involved in the war. Thematically, the novel portrays death in graphic and unsentimental terms, highlighting that destruction is common and death is meaningless as life becomes less worth living each day. After Dolores and her crew are gunned down, the narrator describes the scene: “what they found was carnage. Seven dead, among them a woman and an infant strapped to her back, a man wrapped in a hammock like a netted brown trout…there was a woman with the top of her head blown off” (127).
The nameless, faceless dead are described not as characters but as casualties. Similarly, in the final scene at the river, the innocent people mistaken for subversives are described as “the frenzied movement of humanity struggling for their lives” (229). Furthermore, the reader knows that the army’s attack on the campesinos is unfounded and ill informed, therefore the futility of their death is as clear to us as it is to Nicolás witnessing it from under the ledge: “River. Stone. Dust. Bone. These are the things they would carry. The things they would not forget” (229). Dolores and the captain both expressed hope that Nicolás would carry the lessons they taught, the hope for the future, and the new life brought around by the Revolution. Instead, he will carry the memory of pointless, inhumane death.
The Importance of Religious Miracles
Religion is introduced in the first scene of the novel. Nicolás’s mother has brought him to a Catholic funeral for someone she believes will be named a saint. It is at this funeral that she is shot and killed, her body acting as a shield for her son. Before she dies, she whispers into his ear, “I am here, Nicolás…do not fear. La Virgen is with us” (2). Later, Nicolás will hear these exact same words whenever he is most afraid, only they will come from La Virgen herself instead of his mother. Nicolás cannot bear the thought that his mother has died, so he uses religion and La Virgen to form a protective barrier between himself and reality. He recalls his mother’s words, “pray to La Virgencita, Nico…she’s your mother, too” (16), and takes this literally. He adopts La Virgen as a second mother and turns to her for protection and comfort. His special relationship with La Virgen also keeps him connected with his mother Letty, even after she is gone. Letty named Nicolás after La Virgen Milagrosa, and she gave him a chain “with an oval medal stamped with La Virgen’s image” (11), which he always wears around his neck.
Before his mother dies, Nicolás is already in conversation with Catholicism via his mother. After her death, religion takes on a more important role. La Virgen becomes his personal savior and protector, in lieu of his mother. Each time his situation seems hopeless or overwhelming, La Virgen appears to Nicolás and offers guidance. Because Nicolás comes from a family that believes in saints and miracles, he accepts this guidance and gains the strength to continue on his endless and painful journey. Again and again, Nicolás miraculously survives incredible circumstances, while other characters die meaningless deaths. Each time he survives, he attributes it to La Virgen and her protective powers. The church, rather than politics or people, come to represent a guiding light for him: “the dome of the cathedral loomed and the church rose like an omen before him…that was where he belonged” (15). Later, the church will again beckon him like an omen and his life will be saved when the Army attacks Gerardo and Elias. At the end of the novel, it is La Virgen who guides Nicolás to avoid the massacre at the Sumpul River. Each time Nicolás chooses to follow the church or La Virgen, he is saved.
Just as La Virgen offers comfort and guidance to Nicolás, she also offers a respite from the war. Nicolás and Tata are caught between warring factions. Their family, friends, and land are taken from them. They have nowhere to turn for comfort except the spiritual realm. At the age of nine, Nicolás has seen more horror and trauma than his young brain can handle. When he becomes overwhelmed, it is religion that he turns to for an escape: “He imagined himself on his river, floating on the current, looking up at the sky. Carry me, river, he thought; and he let the river take him to a place where there we no guns, no soldiers, no guerrilleros. Only Our Lady up there in the clouds, shining down on him” (193). Religion becomes an antidote to the horrors of living through war.
Death and Loss
The overarching theme of this novel is loss. Whether the characters are suffering from the loss of a loved one, loss of land, or loss of freedom, each page is in dialogue with loss. We begin with Nicolás losing his mother. Nicolás cannot bear her death, so he imagines that he has only lost her in the chaos, hoping that he will find her: “There you are! She would exclaim. I looked everywhere for you” (15). When he looks for her in the church he is faced with “the sight of openmouthed, bloodied bodies lying on the floor, one against the other like fallen logs” (9). Then the loss of El Retorno, Nicolás and Tata’s village. Next, they lose their rancho to Dolores, and again to the Army. Gerardo’s mother laments the loss of her children, some to death and others to fighting for warring causes. Dolores speaks of the historical loss of El Salvadoran land, which she blames for the current war. She feels that the exploitation of her people and their lands is the greatest loss they have suffered and returning the land to the people is worth losing more lives. The narrator echoes Dolores: “Trudging over the land of their ancestors, land raped of topsoil and nutrients during the indigo days, the people were oblivious to the toil of their forefathers, to the toll their labor had extracted from the earth” (217).
Nicolás is concerned throughout the novel with losing his precious belongings, hiding them in caves and a knot in a tree. He holds on to his mother’s shoe, carvings of a lamb and a lion, the statue of La Virgen, and the medallion he wears around his neck. He is also concerned about becoming lost from his Tata, asking him, “if something happened and we were separated, where would I find you, Tata? Where would you find me?” (100). Nicolás loses almost every person with whom he builds a relationship, from the Army men at the garrison to the remaining villagers from El Retorno. At the close of the novel, it becomes clear that all this death and destruction has resulted in the ultimate loss for Nicolás: his innocence. His childhood is cut short as soon as his mother dies: “he was nine, after all, and a man” (7). The campesinos, wrongly assumed to be subversives working against the Left, agonize over the loss “of loved ones slain or tortured. Weeping over destroyed homes and ravaged possessions” (215).
Nicolás witnesses this suffering, death, and loss during his formative years. Though he survives, Nicolás suffers the traumatic loss of the belief that the world is safe.
Related Titles
By Sandra Benitez
