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And Of Clay Are We Created

Rolf Carlé:
Literary Conflicts Used For Character Development
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Background Information
• The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende is based on the stories
told by the character of Eva Luna in her previous novel Eva Luna
• The framework of the novel is linked to the author’s inspiration
of the famed A Thousand And One Nights
• The majority of the stories depict the machismo traditions
against women in Latin American countries
• The story, “And of Clay Are We Created” is told in the first-
person point of view of the narrator, Eva Luna
• According to Allende, it is based on a true story of a girl she saw
on television of an avalanche in Colombia in 1985
• “…the black eyes of that girl have haunted me. . .”- Isabel
Allende
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And Of Clay Are We Created

• Characters
▫ Narrator
 Eva Luna,
 lover of Rolf Carlé
▫ Rolf Carlé
 Austrian-born journalist
 Protagonist
 determined
▫ Azucena
 girl trapped in mud pit
 Azucena means Lily in Spanish
 Chastity/Purity
 Virtue
 Friendship
 Humility
 Devotion

Plot Summary
• After a devastating avalanche
following a volcanic eruption, Rolf
Carlé was assigned to report on the
event
• He was captured by Azucena’s tragic
situation stuck in the mud pit
▫ “ …the girl’s head protruding from
the mudpit, eyes wide open,
calling soundlessly” (319)
▫ “…never suspecting he would find
a fragment of his past, lost thirty
years before” (319)
• The narrator (Eva Luna) is in the
broadcasting studio looking for any
available footage of Carlé
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• Carlé attempts everything he
physically can to release her from
the mud
▫ “…she was also held by the
bodies of her brothers and sisters
clinging to her legs.” (322)
• Eva Luna herself attempts to
contact rescue from the studio by
calling government officials and
any other help she could get but is
rejected
• After three days, Azucena dies but
the meaning of her situation
brings about Carlé’s hidden reality
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Connection With the Prologue

• “You think in words, for you, language is an
inexhaustible thread you weave as if life were
created as you tell it. I think in the frozen images of
photographs” (4)
• “From an indefinite distance I am looking at that
picture, which includes me. I am spectator and
protagonist” (4)
• “I am there with you, but also here, alone, in a
different frame of consciousness” (4)
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“If there is no struggle, there is no

progress”
-Frederick Douglass, 1857
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Conflicts
• Three types of conflicts that are relevant to Rolf
Carlé’s character in “And of Clay We Are Created”
▫ Man v Nature
▫ Man v Himself
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Man v Nature
• “…Rolf Carlé had the advantage of the television
helicopter, which flew him over the avalanche,” (320)
• “Rolf Carlé had a growth of beard, and dark circles
beneath his eyes, he looked near exhaustion” (325)
• “The spent the night talking, each in a stupor of
exhaustion and hunger, and shaking with cold” (327)
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Man v Himself
• “… He could watch events without actually participating in them… the
fictive distance seemed to protect him from his own emotions.” (321)
• “There in the hellhole of mud, it was impossible for Rolf to flee from
himself and longer, and the visceral terror he had lived as a boy
invaded him” (327)
• “Sorrow flooded through him, intact and precise, as if it had lain
always in his mind, waiting.” (328)
• “…his exploits as a reporter… were merely an attempt to keep his
most ancient fears at bay, a stratagem for taking refuge behind a lens
to test whether reality was more tolerable from that perspective. He
took excessive risks as an exercise of courage, training by day to
conquer the monsters that tormented him by night” (328)
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Summary
• Carlé’s kept past is revealed with the development of
his character in the conflicts presented
• The purpose for his career was not to expose the
truth to the world, but to look for an alternative
truth in his mind
• “Beside you, I wait for you to complete the voyage
into yourself, for the old wounds to heal. I know that
when you return from your nightmares, we shall
again walk hand in hand, as before.”