Nationalist metanarrative in Martín Rivas by Alberto Blest Gana

Abstract

In this article I bring to light the ideological nucleus of the nationalist metanarrative ofAlberto Blest Gana 's novel Martin Rivas. I review the discourse of ideas manifested in the fictional order in order to establish the manner in which the semantic perspective processes the Enlightenment paradigm of the 19th century. I suggest here that such a strategic model is not easily visible in the text and that it is neutralized by another discursive formulation integrated into the narrative space. I suggest therefore that the liberal ideological project (the ideas of progress, freedom, public education, etc.) is ultimately not expressed in the sequence of facts. Rather, it becomes an abstraction overborne by the arrival of a nomenclature that completes the said metanarrative: the bourgeois ideology.