Author Type

Undergraduate Student

Date of Award

5-2014

Document Type

Capstone

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

June 2026

Department

Languages, Linguistics and Comparative Literature

College Granting Degree

Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

Department Granting Degree

Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature

Degree Name

Honors in Major

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Mary Ann Gosser Esquilin

Additional Committee Member 1

Nora Erro Peralta

Abstract

Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (1891-1961), the ruthless Dominican Republic ruler dominated his island’s politics for over thirty years. In his acclaimed 2000 novel, The Feast of the Goat, Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa creates Urania Cabral, a 49-year-old émigrée who at 14 left her nation after becoming Trujillo’s sexual victim. The novel, told from many perspectives, focuses on her return, the dictator’s last day, and the story of the four conspirators waiting to ambush him the night of May 30th 1961. My study analyzes the complex narrative structures of the novel as masterful “rupturing” techniques. Through these the reader pieces together the broken body politic of a traumatized nation as Urania reconstructs in painful detail how the impotent dictator digitally rapes her to ensure her body bears the mark of his brutal anger and frustration.

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