If I had been really good at close reading, I'd have been smart enough to mark those spots that somehow I just knew would form a pattern.
Here, in the closing pages of the story, we're back with Oscar who is in Santo Domingo with his mother visiting his grandmother, and he finally meets another woman with whom he almost has relations with. The problem: her boyfriend is the capitan of policia.
"the dude had no face," — this image has been presented by Diaz earlier in the book and decent reader that I am, I remembered about where it occurred and found it easily. Beli, his mother, is facing a very similar dangerous situation:
And I knew it, another one (maybe more but it's no small feat to find a couple words out of so many pages): Abelard's wife Socorro has had bad dreams just prior to his arrest:
So the faceless man obviously is not only a leit motif, but a symbol within the magical, superstitious world of this family and this country. But of what?
I would tend toward thinking that it symbolizes man's inhumanity to man. The ever-present danger that lies within each of us to be inhumane and uncaring towards others when our own lives may be at stake. Or, less than our own lives; just the upheaval of them or the fear of losing all that we've come to depend upon.
Just as Diaz keeps the atrocities of the governing regime close in the background of the narrative, the evil within us lies just beneath the surface.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
My take was that the faceless man was symbolic of the sort of anonymity that allows the worst of human evil to manifest. The anonymity that comes with submission to authority, with submission to fear, and with perhaps most of all the submission to group-think, such as in countless genocidal societies and countless acts of brutality perpetrated by sociopath-dictators and their minions. And on a smaller scale, such as we see in playground bullying or online bullying (in fact, online everywhere, as the anonymity is free). It is the transformation of a society of individual human beings into a faceless and controllable group that is what allows a Trujillo to have his way.
I think this interpretation is actually pretty closely-aligned with yours.
You’ve pinned it down better than I have done; the key word being “anonymity” that once I read your comment, I see very clearly as a likely interpretation. Thanks!
I think the facelessness throughout the book symbolizes the various Dominican-American characters throughout the generations’ inability to acknowledge their individual yet interrelated traumatic pasts. According to my reading, Oscar, Beli, Abelard, his wife and even Lola’s daughter indirectly have encounters of a faceless man and that the only way to see past the inescapable trauma that trap these characters in stereotypes is to face the facelessness and talk about it.
Oh thank you, I know there was another place in the book involving the faceless man but i could not find it. I’m writing a paper and had both 298 and 141. Very much helpful.
Thanks.
@Matthew: Where does Lola have an encounter with the faceless man?