Requiem

This week I wanted to reflect on Requiem por un campesino espanol. What hit me in class the other day was the fact that the story is being told by Mosen Millan, not Paco. Obviously I realized this when I read the book, but at first I did not recognize how this could introduce bias/a limited perspective, or a different story. It just reinforced the fact that one really must question everything, not only in this book and how Mosen Millan remembers Pacos’ story, but in different aspects of life. Last quarter in one of my classes, my friend and I noticed that one of my professors had multiple mistakes and contradictions in her lectures. If we hadn’t questioned it and taken the effort to dig a little deeper into the information, we would just be blindly agreeing with everything we were told. As a pre-med student, I relate this to medicine as well. It’s becoming increasingly popular to practice “evidence-based medicine;” or practices that have been proved through research, as opposed to doing things just because “that’s the way they’ve always been done.” This relates to Millan as well, who as we have seen, is afraid to contradict the higher powers because of tradition, and he just always repeats the same prayers because it’s what he’s used to and what he has always done. I think it is important as we discuss the book that everyone has a different perspective, and the one that Paco really had could have been misrepresented in this story.