The Perception of Water in the Story “It Is that We Are Very Poor” by Juan Rulfo

Abstract

Generally, in our culture, water appears associated with positive qualities such as life, purity, odorless, and tasteless, but in Juan Rulfo's story “It Is that We Are Very Poor”, published in 1953, water is perceived with negative qualities. In this article a semantic qualitative method is used to analyze the story, which is described by the ways of naming water, the qualifiers of water, water and the senses, the actions of water and the correlation between natural determinism and social determinism. An attempt is made to make it clear, through the different approaches that allow qualitative semantic analysis, that water and its different manifestations are negative, producing situations that are related to the social determinism raised in the story. In the same way, an attempt is made to make evident, from the perception that one has about the water, how it influences the perception of the moral qualities of the female characters in the story, specifically the narrator's sisters.