Essay Questions

How can the crowd tell that the stranger is not from the countryside or outer limits of Buenos Aires?

The man is what is disdainfully considered to be a city slicker. This is immediately obvious to the crowd because he rides a horse with a saddle on it, and a gringo style saddle no less. This immediately identifies him to the crowd as a city dweller. The man is also throwing caution to the wind in the way that he is attired; he has shaved his sideburns into the shape of the letter U, which is a symbol of his support for the opposition party, whose supporters are drawn predominantly from the more educated echelons of the city.

His educational level also shows the man to be a city slicker. He speaks Spanish as it is written, in a literary, traditional way. His grammar is perfect and he addresses everyone in the crowd in the third person. This is very different to the way in which the crowd members and even the Judge speaks; their Spanish is colloquial and riddled with street slang that is not spoken by the city slicker kind of Argentinian such as the stranger.

What does the escape of the bull symbolize about the political situation in Echevarria's time?

Echevarria uses the slaughteryard as a symbol of the political situation in Argentina in the 1830s. The animals in the yard are rounded up and slaughtered in an inhumane fashion, the entire thing taking minutes, and happening before they even realize it. There is no protest, and they are killed by the very people they thought were taking care of them. These cattle symbolize the crowd, who are under the impression that the Fedrealist regime is taking care of the people, when in reality they will be disposed of quickly at the will of their leader.

The bull who escapes is smarter than the rest and realizes the fate that befalls him. He makes an escape and for a while this seems to have been successful. He is caught, brought back to the slaughteryard, and killed in a particularly barbaric way almost as a punishment. The symbolism of this part of the story is to show that any kind of resistance to the regime is futile, and will be punished by a brutal and barbaric death.