Realism and reality in Mercy of Galdos

In Misericordia (1897), Goldos displayed some techniques characteristic of the modernist novel, such as the unreliable narrator, or deconstructing narrative structures. This article examines the means by which Goldos explored and presented reality in the subjective and anti -positivist manner of modernism. More precisely, it analyses the interplay between the real world and the idealised world as imagined by the characters, and how these two layers of reality become one. Misericordia thus prefigures modernist realism by forging a new literary form of a reality founded upon dream and illusion.