A Life Told Backwards

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Carlos Fuentes's 1962 novel The Death of Artemio Cruz narrates the last day in the life of a dying newspaper magnate and former revolutionary through three alternating narrative voices, a first person present tense, a second person future tense addressed to the dying man himself, and a third person past tense recounting episodes from his life out of chronological order. The fractured structure lets the novel expose the gap between the idealistic young revolutionary Cruz had once been and the corrupt oligarch he became, using Cruz's single life as a lens on the broader betrayal Fuentes saw in the Mexican Revolution's aftermath.