The Feast of The Goat - Background

Background

The Feast of the Goat is only the second of Vargas Llosa's novels to be set outside Peru (the first being The War of the End of the World). It is also unusual because it is the first to have a female protagonist: as critic Lynn Walford writes of the leading character in The Feast of the Goat, and also Vargas Llosa's subsequent book The Way to Paradise, "both are utterly unlike any of the other female characters in his previous novels".

The novel examines the dictatorial regime of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina in the Dominican Republic. Trujillo was, in historian Eric Roorda's words, "a towering influence in Dominican and Caribbean history" who presided over "one of the most durable regimes of the twentieth century" during the thirty-one years between his seizure of power in 1930 and his assassination in 1961. Trujillo had trained with the United States Marine Corps during the United States occupation of the island, and graduated from the Haina Military Academy in 1921. After the U.S. departed in 1924, he became head of the Dominican National Police which, under his command, was transformed into the Dominican National Army and Trujillo's personal "virtually autonomous power base".

Trujillo was officially dictator only from 1930 to 1938, and from 1942 to 1952, but remained in effective power throughout the entire period. Though his regime was broadly nationalist, Daniel Chirot comments that he had "no particular ideology" and that his economic and social policies were basically progressive.

The novel's title is taken from the popular Dominican merengue Mataron al chivo ("They Killed the Goat"), which refers to Trujillo's assassination on May 30, 1961. Merengue is a style of music created by Ñico Lora in the 1920s and actively promoted by Trujillo himself; it is now considered the country's national music. Cultural critics Julie Sellers and Stephen Ropp comment about this particular merengue that, by envisaging the dictator as an animal who could be turned into a stew (as frequently happened with goats struck down on the Dominican Republic's highways), the song "gave those performing, listening to and dancing to this merengue a sense of control over him and over themselves that they had not experienced for over three decades." Vargas Llosa quotes the lyrics to Mataron al chivo at the beginning of the novel.