Camilo Jose Cela wrote The Family of Pascual Duarte in the tradition of "tremendismo," a literary genre focused on the suffering of its primary characters. In this case Pascual is the unfortunate protagonist. He is a troubled man, prone to violence, who cannot seem to move past the injustices his mother made him suffer as a child. Every time misfortune visits Pascual, he blames his mother, but he's projecting. He believes that she, and others like the dog he kills, blame him for the accidents of his life, like his first child's untimely death. Really, Pascual blames himself for those tragedies and, unable to find peace, projects his shame onto his mother, in a strictly Freudian manner. When he finally kills her, he expresses no regret, revealing that his psychological transformation is complete. He's completely detached his conscience from his ego.
Recounting his life events from a prison cell in a document later addressed to a relative of the last man whom he murdered, Pascual describes the series of ill fortune which, according to him, determined the awful direction of his life. Born to a smuggler/farmer and a sociopathic mother, he worked extremely hard in his youth. Losing both of his siblings -- Rosario runs away and Marco dies as a child, -- he leaves home to start his own family with a precocious girl named Lola. They lose two children, though, and Pascual decides to run away to America. After trying to earn the money in Madrid for a couple years, he finally returns home to be greeted by a resentful wife and mother.
From that point onward Pascual completely gives in to his choleric temper, and a series of violent acts follows -- scaring Lola to death, murdering Rosario's pimp, murdering his mother in her sleep, and finally murdering the Count for whom he and his father worked. This finaly murder is the one which lands Pascual in prison, where the audience meets him at the beginning of the novel.
Cela arranges the book as a series of documents. The first is a note from the transcriber, an anonymous individual who apparently came across Pascual's prison memoir and decided to give it to the pharmacist to whom it was addressed. The transcriber explains how, although somewhat incoherent and illogical, he attempted to preserve the original text and to change only pieces which were necessary for legibility. Following this opening, the series of entries by Pascual is introduced. Apparently he regrets having murdered the Count and now wishes to explain himself to the murdered man's living relatives, in this case the pharmacist.
Because Cela introduces the story within this theoretical and time-bound frame, readers anticipate Pascual to be an unreliable narrator, which suspicion he satisfies. By the end of the book, when the narrative returns to Pascual's fate in prison, the tone shifts from sympathy to horror. Pascual's story is cautionary and disturbing, the events of his life being traumatic but not in any way a justification of his extremely violent response.
