Power, Will and Freedom: Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat

This article seeks to explore and elucidate the liberal values and principles underpinning Mario Vargas Llosa's work by offering a careful reading of his recent novel, The Feast of the Goat (2000). Having critically examined in several of his earlier novels what he regards as the inevitable destructiveness of socialist utopianism, Vargas Llosa turns his attention in The Feast of the Goat to the equally destructive force of right-wing authoritarianism, manifested in this case by the brutal thirty-one-year dictatorship of the Dominican Republic's Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Unlike other versions of the so-called Latin American dictator novel, which tended to utilise allegorical and even magic-realist techniques, The Feast of the Goat focuses in meticulously researched historical detail upon the very real figure of Trujillo in order to consider the tensions between the eternally antagonistic human aspirations of power and freedom. While providing a vivid if harrowing account of the dictator's grim tyranny and corruption, the novel goes on to reveal, more pertinently perhaps, how people are all too often and too easily prepared to forfeit their liberty for some other putative social or economic good, only to find themselves becoming complicit, voluntarily or otherwise, in their own oppression. Finally, through the characters of a number of Trujillo's victims, as well as his eventual assassins, the novel presents an alternative vision of a truly free and open society.