What lessons does Espinosa learn in the country? What important ...

[RRMR]

What lessons does Espinosa learn in the country? What important lessonsdoes he not notice as the weeks of his stay drag on?
 
  What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

Is the significance of Espinosas death entirely ironic? Or does he resembleChrist in any important respect?
 
  What will be an ideal response?

[bassamabas]

Answer to Question 1

• He learns a few superficial things about how life is lived in the country, as described in paragraph 3. He fails to learn what will turn out to be much more important lessons, such as how the Gutres regard him as an exotic and superior being and obey him unquestioningly, paving the way for them to conflate him with Christ; how they literally accept and believe everything that is told or read to them; and how thoroughly primitive and unsophisticated they are, leading them to see a miraculous dimension to his curing the lamb with antibiotics. On a more immediate level, he fails to realize the significance of the hammering he hears in the middle of the night.

Answer to Question 2

• The central question in interpreting Borgess story is whether it merely depicts a grotesquely ironic misunderstanding or rather suggests a deeper religious vision. Whatever ones conclusions, it is certain that Borges had a lifelong fascination with the idea of Christ and redemption. Some of his best stories, like Three Versions of Judas and The Circular Ruins, explicitly concern the Incarnation. Borges never used the Christian mythos carelessly. A narrowly ironic reading of The Gospel According to Mark is easy to make. It is an ironic horror story in which the protagonist unwittingly creates the conditions for his own ritual murder. Read this way, the story is quite satisfactorylike a superior episode of The Twilight Zone. The story, however, also allows a deeper, though still ironic religious reading. Here, too, Espinosa is an unwitting Christ-figure, but one understands him not to represent real Christianity but a shallow parody of it. He is a Christ without divinity, a figure whose teaching lacks moral weight and whose death will save no one. When quizzed by the Gutre father about particular points in the Gospel, Espinosa asserts things he does not believe in order to save face. His theology is a bit shaky, and so he answers other questions without examining their logical or theological consistency. In his bewildered way, Espinosa enjoys the authority of his divine position, but he neither understands nor deserves it. He is a well-meaning sham, quite unable to comprehend that the Gutres (whom he unmaliciously, but also un-Christianly, considers beneath him) might take matters of salvation seriously. He is a dilettante unsuitably cast in the role of a deity. Although he seems to accept his death meekly (we do not know for sure what follows his realization), he has only the outward features of a redeemer. His dabbling in the divine has not only destroyed him, it has morally corrupted his followers. Espinosa may be a Christ-figure, but he is no Christ.