Dance With Snakes

Dance With Snakes addresses social issues involving politics and the media, in a way that makes you never want to set it down. On the surface, the book is violent and profane, but underneath all of that there is real substance that gets to the heart of the matter. In 1996 Horacio Castellanos Moya released this one-hundred and fifty-six page epic tale about death, identity, and snakes.

The main issue that the books addresses is the control that the media has over the majority of the population. Moya shows how people can get so wrapped up in what the media says, especially about devastating events, that they are willing to believe any explanation for what happened, even if there is none. One point where this is blatantly obvious is during the times when characters in the book are speculating about why these crimes are being committed and nobody can decide on an answer. Everyone gets so wrapped up in the justifications that they have created in their own heads, that it almost becomes more important that who is actually committing the crimes.

Another interesting idea that is brought up in Moya’s book is that modern culture is forcing people to become more introverted. Eduardo Sosa would be an extreme example of this. He has become so involved in his own world, and excluded from the outside that his main companions are snakes. His disconnection from society goes so far that he barely bats an eye when the snakes kill dozens of people right before him. It is highly unlikely that Moya wrote this without the intention of making society take a long hard look at itself and try to see what’s going wrong.

When any sort of serious discussion about this book occurs, one has to ask if Moya’s gratuitous violence is really the best way to address the given issues. It was a method that was certainly quite effective, but are there also drawbacks to introducing even more violent images into the media (mainstream or not)? It also begs the question of the light that the violence occurred in. It was certainly not portrayed as something positive, but there seemed to be a lack of negativity to it due to the fact that all of the violent acts are first described by the one committing them.

All of these factors lead to the question is Eduardo Sosa the hero or the villain. In the chapters told by Handal and Rita, he is the villain, or rather Jacinto Bustillo is the villain. The murder of Bustillo is really the only cirme that Sosa commits as himself. The rest he commits as Bustillo, or at least that is what he claims. The reader sees the majority of the story through his eyes, so it is difficult not to see him in a somewhat positive light, but at the same time, he commits such horrible crimes. The only answer is that he is somewhere in between. He is not a hero or a villain, but rather an individual who is telling the reader the story of his life.