Spanish literature: ‘Escuadra hacia la muerte’
Alfonso Sastre translated the ‘Escuadra hacia la Muerte’ for their benefits in Spanish and also to explain the problems that theatre translators get when turning drama that is for reading but to is performed and modified to an audience (Death Squad | work by Sastre, 2020). Sastre showed Spain search for liberty and produced a fundamental theme of revolution. Through his characters, we see how hypocrisy, political and moral injustices existed in society. Alfonso used characters like the soldiers and their leaders to express the theme of liberty in different situations. Choices of the soldiers and their leader, colonel, brought both tragedy to acquire freedom.
Goban was the colonel, a sergeant that got demoted to a corporal. The colonel was abusive because of how he led the soldiers. He beat the soldiers and even never allowed them to rest (Hunter, 2004). The colonel was committed to his work on leading the soldiers. He installed law and order in the camp with the rules that he set. In the play, we see Goban was a dictator who made the unit have subjects, the soldiers, and a ruler, the colonel (Hunter, 2004). He was a maniacal disciplinarian to the soldiers, and he got the position because of the crime he committed. He became inhuman and insensitive to the commitment he had to the military.
Colonel stands for a God-image in the play, and he represents the laws and order that regulates man. The murder of Goban by the soldiers show the death of the traditional army discipline and the routine (Hunter, 2004). It also shows the means of how the establishment got changed by removing the creator’s image, who was the colonel. The colonel made the camp be a monarchy and therefore shaping it in his way. He could control everything to will his power.
Goban’s personality shows that he is afraid of making one mistake because it would lead him to the soldiers’ level. He, therefore, has an obsession with power. The soldiers think that Goban is a sadistic dictator, and thus they were willing to do anything to overpower him because he was confining them physically and even mentally (Hunter, 2004). The squad was ready to go to war because, in the literature, war meant peace, and therefore there was a need for was to balance the power (Hunter, 2004). Goban got outnumbered, and his fear of being overpowered got justified.
The play shows how the leading role is desperate to get rid of some situation, which leads him to become more violent and attain freedom. The behavior of the colonel tends to show a personality of a standard or abnormal behavior, which causes situations that make them deviate from what is considered normal. Goban’s character was as a result of war experience. In war, they got taught to be abusive, and murder got justified as being a hero.
References
Encyclopedia Britannica. 2020. Death Squad | Work By Sastre. [online] Available at: <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Death-Squad> [Accessed 22 June 2020].
Hunter, D., 2004. University of Richmond UR Scholarship Repository. The search for liberty in the theatre of Alfonso Sastre,