Hayley Wheeler

Mrs. Fonseca

CAS 115, T/Th

16 December 2013

Luna, Hero or Coward?

            In Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s novel, The Good Cripple, Juan Luis Luna is shown to be both a hero and a coward. Right from the start, Luna is shown as a son who desperately wants to break away from his father’s way of living and from the violence that so greatly surrounds him in society. However, by the end of Rey Rosa’s novel, Luna has strayed far from his earlier goals. Luna is perceived to be a hero as he refuses to conform to the violence in society, yet he also appears as a coward when he seems to give up the fight in the end.

Luna is determined to not follow in the footsteps of his father or to conform to the evil of the world. His father, Don Carlos, is someone who is not afraid to get involved in crime. He is very wealthy and holds a great deal of power. Luna though, does not want to live in his dishonest ways. Consequently, Luna has an ongoing battle of morals and what seems to be fate. He begins to notice more aspects of his father within himself as time goes on, but he fights them back determinedly.  There is one instance when Luna is listening to the voice of his conscience and he realizes “with a familiar wave of anger, that that voice was the voice of his father” (Rey Rosa 74). He soon comes to realize that he is stuck in a “vicious cycle” where he is unable to escape the personality traits and genes he inherited. He spends so long fighting his fate of becoming like his father, until he realizes that it is a hopeless case. No

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matter how hard he tries, he knows he will end up only more like his father and society in their violent ways. At this revelation, Luna knows that there is only one thing he can do to end the cycle of violence. He can promise himself to never have children. This would cut off his future descendants, which would stop the violence that would be passed down from generation to generation. Luna is a hero for making this decision. He sacrificed so much because having descendants is what keeps the memory of one alive even after they are gone. Luna saved the world from future violence, earning himself the name of a true hero.

Luna’s own name, which is Latin for “moon”, is a great representation of Luna’s situation. Rey Rosa could have chosen any other name, yet he chose Luna to better illustrate the character’s circumstances. He is stuck in a “vicious cycle” that he is incapable of escaping, just as the moon is incapable of escaping its own cycle. Luna desperately tries to pull away from his father’s lifestyle, yet just as the moon is unable to escape the gravitational pull of the earth and sun, he is unable to escape the way he revolves around his father’s lifestyle. He may be changing his view of life, yet the distance or similarity between himself and his father does not substantially change. In the same way, the moon changes position as it revolves around the earth and sun, yet like Luna, the moons’ distance from the sun does not significantly change. Another way the moon is an excellent representation of Luna is how it reflects the sun’s light. Luna is a reflection of his father, and no matter how much he wants to make his own light, it is not going to happen.

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On the other hand, Luna may be perceived as a coward. One may say that he should have more faith in his future or that he could become his own person if he would just work harder. Luna has a strong start of trying to break away from his father’s lifestyle, yet he loses steam as time goes on. Luna seems to have more and more violent thoughts and he starts to participate in corrupt activities. He starts going to whore houses and then even lies to his wife. After talking to Bunny, one of the people who kidnapped him, he has “two related but contradictory ideas” that were “alternating on his mental horizon: I must kill him…I must not kill him” (93). When Luna finally decides not to kill Bunny, the reader might be thinking that Luna is a noble person, yet then they realize that the reason is because “it wasn’t worth dirtying his hands with the blood of a man like that” (93). Luna suddenly seems extremely self-centered in the way that he does not even think about morals, but only what he feels like doing.

Luna may also appear as a coward when compared to Bunny. Bunny was one of Luna’s kidnappers who participated in the mutilations, money exchange, and came up with the whole idea of the kidnapping in the first pace. The reader’s first view of Bunny, in the beginning of the novel, is of an extremely corrupt man who has no regret when bringing harm to others. When Bunny then reappears at the end of the novel though, he is a completely different man. He is no longer violent or greedy, but as he says, “the most peaceable man in the world” (111). He is married and has three children and when Luna questions him about the kidnapping, Bunny tells him everything without holding back. On top of that, when he tells Luna about the

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kidnapping, he speaks with great sadness and regret at what he had done. He admits that it was a “crazy idea” and that after getting out of the hospital after the accident, he “came out a new man” (111).   After seeing all this change in Bunny’s life, one may wonder why Luna could not have changed. Bunny made the decision to turn his life around, so Luna should have been able to successfully turn his life around too. Yet he does not, making him look weak and like a coward who was not up to the challenge. Luna seems to not want to put in the effort to break away from the cycle of violence. Then, at the very end of Rey Rosa’s novel, Luna makes the decision that “he [does] not want to have children—he [is] sure of that” (116). This is because he realizes that he is becoming more and more like his father, which means his children will ultimately be violent just as he and his father before him was. It seems as if Luna just gives up completely and conforms to the ways of the society. Everyone has control over the decisions they make, so Luna should have taken control of his life and put in the effort to be who he wanted to be.

In conclusion, Rodrigo Rey Rosa displays Juan Luis Luna as a hero, even though at moments he may look like a coward. Luna saves the world from future violence when he makes the decision to not have children. As a result, he cuts off the inevitable violence that is passed down to him, and that he would inevitably pass down to his children. He knows that stopping the cycle of violence is impossible, just as stopping the moon’s cycle is impossible, so he acts on his only option, which is to not have children. On the contrary, one may think that Luna’s changing for the better is possible. One may believe that he could have control of his future lifestyle

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and change his fate; he only needs to work harder and persevere. Since Bunny changes into a peaceable man, Luna should be able to as well. Yet in the end, Luna realizes that trying to break away from the “vicious cycle” is a hopeless case. He understands that he cannot escape the corruption inside himself. Thus, with his only option being to cut off the cycle itself, he makes the decision to not have children, thus saving the world from future violence.

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Work Cited

Rey Rosa, Rodrigo. The Good Cripple. New York: New Directions Books, 2004. Print.