Abstract
In a literary career spanning over fifty years Augusto Roa Bastos has established himself as one of Latin America's foremost novelists and has given Paraguay's literature a profile it had never previously enjoyed. Roa Bastos makes no secret of his political commitment as a writer, and his work displays a deep and incisive understanding of the social and political conditions that have shaped Paraguay. Within Roa Bastos's literary production two novels, Hijo de hombre and Yo el Supremo, have received the bulk of the critical attention. However, these novels form part of the author's Paraguayan trilogy alongside the more recent novel El fiscal and to date no major work has examined Roa Bastos's trilogy as a whole. This study aims to correct this deficiency by examining how Roa Bastos's trilogy examines the presence of dictatorship in Paraguay and its effects on society, and how the trilogy's depiction of dictatorship evolves over time. In each chapter the appropriate novel's depiction of the means by which dictatorships support themselves will be examined, as will the implications of each of the regimes depicted. The author uses both history and myth in the representation of these governments. His trilogy questions the possibility of historical veracity and rejects myth as a basis for government by exposing how unscrupulous regimes manipulate both history and myth to use them to support their power. The depiction in the trilogy of resistance and the questioning of its value will also be examined. Over thirty years divide the writing of Hijo de hombre from that of El fiscal, a period which saw major changes in both the global political situation and the author's life. The effects these developments have had on Roa Bastos's works, and the thematic evolution of his novels will be examined in the current work.