The Motorcycle Diaries

It is an irony that the guerrilla Ernesto Che Guevara, one of the most intriguing figures of Latin America, has come to be immortalized as an icon of popular culturea pin-up, poster boy of sorts that lends face to the mass-produced Che togs and pins. This gigantic appeal, however, needs to be rooted in the context of what prompted him to become a revolutionary, to a time forwards he took up arms and became a legend. Retracing such r surfacee to a decisive era in Guevaras early life is the book The cycle Diaries A Journey Around southwest America.The motorcycle Diaries A Journey Around South America is the memoir of twenty-three year-old medical student Ernesto Guevara de la Serna when he embarked upon a pilgrimage crossways South America with his older friend Rodrigo Granado. In count for fun and adventure, theirs is a rather grand route that spans Argentina, Chile, Peru, the Peruvian Amazon, Colombia and Venezuela. The two start out on base a lumbering 1939 Norton 500 moto rcycle they named La Poderosa (The Mighty One) which eventually crashes on the way and forces them to drop dead on foot.Chronological entries in The motorbike Diaries detail Ernestos narrative of the eight-month journey, in which they initially cherished to seek bourgeois pleasures like getting drunk and getting laid. Early on, they pose as Argentine leprosy doctors in order to gain accommodations and hospitable treatment from local folks. Further on the road, Ernesto and Alberto sh be a series of youthful misadventures, at times committing scams to get themselves by. In an event, Ernesto tries to work as a chevy-eater but sleeps out on the sounding fire alarm so that the building on fire burns down.Even if the diaries present the characters bawdy behavior, it much importantly accounts for a great discovery that moreover such journey can offer them. As they themselves experience poverty and come face-to-face with wiped out(p) townsfolk, nameless people whose living condition s sharply contrast the lavish lifestyle they were born into, their view of the hu macrocosmity changes. Incidents in the diaries concretely speak of these encounters with complaisant injustice. When Ernesto sees a tuberculosis-stricken woman in her death bed, he realizes how unforgiving the public health system is. When he tours a copper mine (which has schooln lives of miners), he discovers how laborers are famished and unfairly treated.Throughout the trip, not only does Ernesto stumble upon the endemic poverty and subjugation of the peoples across South America. He is withal able to dupe his stand regarding a unified Latin America. A passage in the The Motorcycle Diaries get hold ofsAlthough we are too insignificant to be a spokesman for such a noble cause, we believe, and this journey has only served to confirm this belief, that the division of America into unstable and illusory nations is a off fiction. We are one single mestizo race with remarkable ethnographical simil arities, from Mexico down to the Magellan straits. And so, in an take in charge to break free from an all narrow-minded provincialism, I propose a toast to Peru and United America.From non-homogeneous South American sights running parallel to each other, Ernesto sees his ideal of Pan-American unification which he would later bridge politically. He maintains that since all of Latin America share a common experience and long chronicle of oppression, hence should they have an integrated movement towards their liberation. (Later in his life, Ernesto demonstrated how he lived up to this ideal, touring across the pure to unite different guerrilla units and revolutionary forces in different countries.)What was originally meant to be a journey for fun and adventure turned out to be the provocation necessary to make a revolutionary. absorption and encounters with workers being laid-off and fighting for jobs, starving farmers, and other vestiges of feudal rule on agricultural communitie s make only a few threads weaving the larger story of oppression that proved beardown(prenominal) enough to catapult individuals like Ernesto Guevara to the fray.These experiences caused such indignation in Ernesto, sending him to become the revolutionary who changed the biography of South America. Both Alberto (who came back to Argentina to pursue medicine and dedicate his practice for the poor) and Ernesto show that the things they cut from their journey are hard truthsrealities often obscured to the upper economic classes but inescapable realities nevertheless, needing to be dealt with actions more forceful than charity. The characters of The Motorcycle Diaries are a testament that revolutionaries are made, not born.The life-changing theme that prevails in The Motorcycle Diaries is conveyed by other allegories pertaining to the characters awakening. For instance, the river separating the leper colony to the medical staffs island symbolizes the gap between the powerful and the oppressed. Ernestos act of dissolving this symbolic divide is a portent to the way he would later take in his life.Ernestos Diaries is written with such vividness and animation, and is punctuated with a range of ordinary human emotions, from roguery and vulgarity to a sense of righteousness and justice. He states even his most roguish actions in a matter-of-fact tone that you would think of shooting a puma in the dark of the night (which turns out to be a neighbors dog) as if it is the most natural thing to do. Even if Ernesto writes The Motorcycle Diaries from his own viewpoint, it does not render him heroically larger-than-life.In 2004, a film bearing the same rubric was made based on the book. There are minor deviations from the book to account for, particularly the skip of several interesting incidents (like shooting of the puma and sneaking inside a shipment of melons, etc.). The film also romanticizes the love angle between Ernesto and his fiance, which, in the diaries, doe s not appear to be such a highlight. patronage these, however, the film is still quite able to introduce the essence of the written memoirs to those who have not read them yet.The Motorcycle Diaries A Journey Around South America has written down how witnessing concrete forms of social injustice could change a persons worldview and awaken him from his ignorance and unconscious indifference. At least for the man who later became the revolutionary Che Guevara, the journey even served to fuel his future actions in defiance of the prevailing system he found oppressive.The catchphrase Before he changed the world, the world changed him (promoting the film version of The Motorcycle Diaries) speaks truthfully of the bereted man we see ubiquitously as a pop icon. In turn, the book speaks of demystifying the face behind the shirt and the poster and understanding, from his beginnings, the persona who the powers-that-be, for so long, have come to vilify.Guevara, Che, The Motorcycle Diaries A Jo urney Around South America.October 1996. New York Verso.