By Israel Centeno

The death of God, proclaimed by Nietzsche in the nineteenth century, was not merely a philosophical diagnosis—it was an existential challenge. In the face of heaven’s silence, some sought solace in ancient rituals; others, like Mario Vargas Llosa, found in the novel a secular cathedral in which to house unanswerable questions. His work is not a mere aesthetic exercise but a vital project that transforms narrative into a tool for ethical, political, and metaphysical inquiry. In these pages, we untangle the ideological pillars, psychological obsessions, and formal strategies that forged the last great architect of the total novel in the Spanish language.

Nietzsche’s pronouncement echoed in Vargas Llosa as a creative mandate. If God was dead, the novel would be the new sacred space in which to interrogate everything: power, desire, history. From his early works—The Cubs (1959), The Time of the Hero (1963)—this totalizing vocation is already palpable. The almost mathematical rigor of his narrative structures, with interwoven flashbacks and superimposed voices, does not seek to mimic chaos but to tame it. It is an act of faith in narrative order as a substitute for divine order. At the Leoncio Prado Military Academy, a microcosm of a fractured Peru, his characters embody the crisis of post-divine values. The Jaguar, the Poet, the Slave: none fights against God, but rather against the vacuity of a world with no moral compass. The novel, then, emerges as a tool for collective exorcism. Writing, for Vargas Llosa, was always an act of insubordination against “life’s insufficiencies,” as he would later define them in The Truth of Lies.

When he arrived in Paris in 1959, Vargas Llosa carried with him three convictions: literature must be revolutionary; Sartre was his moral compass; and socialist realism was the aesthetic of the future. But in The Time of the Hero, the crack already appears. While orthodox Marxism reduced oppression to economic structures, Vargas Llosa revealed how power is reproduced in the smallest gestures: in the cadets’ vulgar language, the teachers’ silent complicity, and violence as a rite of belonging. The castration of Cuéllar in The Cubs—by a stray dog—symbolizes the triumph of absurdity over any rational project of social change. This turn was not apostasy but tragic evolution: Marxism starved to death in his fiction, devoured by its inability to explain the complexity of human desire.

If Marxism marked his youth, existentialism gave shape to his precocious maturity. In Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), Vargas Llosa reaches the peak of his existential exploration. Zavalita’s famous question—“At what point did Peru screw itself up?”—seeks not a concrete answer but a confrontation with the impossibility of finding meaning in a disenchanted world. Characters like Ambrosio and Hortensia embody the Sartrean paradox: condemned to be free in a society that rewards complicity and punishes authenticity. Here his narrative method crystallizes: using polyphony as a mode of thought. A technique he learned from Faulkner and Dos Passos, it allows him to show how truth fragments into irreconcilable perspectives. Each chapter is a broken mirror reflecting a different facet of the human condition.

Beyond ideology and form, the burning core of his literature lies in the wound. Vargas Llosa’s biography functions as the psychic subsoil of his fiction. The traumatic reunion with his father at age ten, after believing him dead, became a foundational myth. Don Ernesto Vargas reappears again and again in disguise: as Lieutenant Gamboa in The Time of the Hero, as Don Fermín Zavala in Conversation…, as Trujillo in The Feast of the Goat. All are variations on the tyrannical father who symbolically castrates his sons. For Jung, the shadow represents what is repressed; for Vargas Llosa, the shadow is the narrative engine. The Jaguar, Fonchito, Urania Cabral: all are creatures of that shadow that defy the established order. The Oedipal conflict becomes sublimated into novelistic architecture. Writing was his way of taming the demons, as he confessed in A Fish in the Water.

Another philosophical foundation that shapes his aesthetics is Ortega y Gasset’s perspectivism. The influence of The Dehumanization of Art is visible in two of his most ambitious novels. In Conversation in the Cathedral, the narrative structure multiplies voices, times, and memories. Four narrators, dozens of secondary figures, interspersed passages: all to replicate the chaos of consciousness. The “truth” about Peru is built and deconstructed as the dialogue unfolds, like a jigsaw puzzle with no master piece. In The War of the End of the World, the Canudos conflict is narrated through irreconcilable viewpoints: religious fanatics, positivist military officers, anarchist dreamers, cynical journalists. Vargas Llosa doesn’t judge; he exposes. And by doing so, he reveals how every ideology—religious, militarist, or libertarian—generates its own mythology. Thus, he transcends social realism without falling into solipsism: his total novel is a theater of the world where all voices have the right to resonate.

His foray into theater was not a deviation from his narrative project but its intensification. In The Young Lady of Tacna, a writer attempts to reconstruct his aunt’s life, only to reveal the void of his own frustrations. Theater becomes a hall of mirrors: fiction within fiction lays bare the lies we need to survive. In The Madman of the Balconies, a professor obsessed with colonial balconies embodies that Vargasllosian paradox in which art is both refuge and evasion, resistance and self-deception. Theater allowed him to take his credo to the limit: a well-told lie is truer than fact. In renouncing realism, he found a path to explore the Dionysian core of his themes—eroticism, madness, nostalgia as ways of knowing.

In parallel, his relationship with autobiography was always oblique. Vargas Llosa never wrote conventional memoirs; instead, he practiced autofiction as transfiguration. In The Cubs, the brawls between Lima gangs are transpositions of his adolescent conflicts with paternal authority. In Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, his love story with his political aunt is interwoven with radio soap opera parodies, creating a metafictional game on the boundaries between life and literature. By turning biography into literary myth, he aligns with Proust and Joyce, recognizing that autobiographical truth does not reside in facts but in their aesthetic transformation.

In the era of tweets and liquid novels, his work rises as a narrative acropolis. His discoveries remain relevant. The ethics of form—that idea that style is a moral stance—proved that political commitment and aesthetic rigor are not at odds. His novels do not theorize about the human condition; they embody it. And his method of multiplying voices, far from fragmenting the story, becomes an antidote to the simplifications of post-truth. As he wrote in Letters to a Young Novelist, literature is “a permanent form of insurrection.” Vargas Llosa, secular priest of that credo, leaves us a mandate: keep writing, even if the mirror is shattered, because within its shards the pulse of the human still beats.

And as we close these pages, Zavalita’s question echoes once more: “At what point did everything go wrong?” The Vargasllosian answer would likely be a pregnant silence, followed by a laugh and an invitation: keep reading, keep writing. For in the act of narrating—that secular ritual—we continue to find, like him, a way not to die entirely.