The Lacuna

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of anti-gay bias.

“In the beginning were the howlers. They always commenced their bellowing in the first hour of dawn, just as the hem of the sky began to whiten. It would start with just one: his forced, rhythmic groaning, like a saw blade. That aroused others near him, nudging them to bawl along with his monstrous tune. Soon the maroon-throated howls would echo back from other trees, farther down the beach, until the whole jungle filled with roaring trees. As it was in the beginning, so it is every morning of the world.”

These opening lines of The Lacuna establish a key motif of the novel: the howler monkeys. The “howlers” become an extended metaphor that supports The Role of the Media in Shaping Public Perception and Creating Panic. The language used in these lines gives the impression that the story is a Biblical parable or a fable. The first phrase, “In the beginning,” is found in the common English-language translation of Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Although Shepherd is not religious at all, the evocation of Biblical imagery makes his assessment of the “howlers” seem like a universal truth, one that is echoed in secular terms with Shepherd’s “Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Howlers” at the end of the novel (633).

“They were prisoners on an island, like the Count of Monte Cristo. The hacienda had heavy doors and thick walls that stayed cool all day, and windows that let in the sound of the sea all night: hush, hush, like a heartbeat. He would grow thin as bones here, and when the books were all finished, he would starve.

But no, now he would not. The notebook from the tobacco stand was the beginning of hope: a prisoner’s plan for escape. Its empty pages would be the book of everything, miraculous and unending like the sea at night, a heartbeat that never stops.”

As a boy, Shepherd is obsessed with page-turning novels like The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. He associates himself with the eponymous Count, as they are both trapped on an island prison. In this quote, he realizes that he can use his writing as a way to “escape,” if only in his imagination, from the island.