Platero y yo by Juan Ramón Jiménez: summary and analysis of the book

Platero and me is a narrative work, written by the author Juan Ramón Jiménez, in which the anecdotes, life and death of Platero, a singular donkey, are related.

The book, published in 1914, represents the transition of the narrative from modernism and all subsequent currents. It is a text that goes beyond the romantic, modernist and superficial tendency, to invoke real experiences and emotions.

It supposes a return of the poet to the world of childhood and the land where he was born, for this he makes use of poetic prose and reflects on complex life issues through the abundance of resources literary.

Let's see, next, how this manifests itself through a summary and analysis of the book.

Resume

The play Platero and me he is about the life of a much loved donkey named Platero. This ass is under the care of a young man who loves him and treats him as if he were his best friend. For various reasons, including the death of his family, this boy does not trust other people.

The narration does not have a chronological order, the chapters compile and expose lived experiences and memories, which come and go, between Platero and the narrator. However, the events related take place in spring and culminate in winter, coinciding with the seasons of the year.

Let's see some of the experiences that happen to the protagonists at each time of the year:

Home (I-XXIV)

At the beginning of the play, the narrator describes the donkey. From then on, the young man narrates the adventures that he lives with Platero.

His first experiences include: the night a man wants to steal their food, but the narrator manages to avoid it. Also when the donkey sticks a spike and almost becomes lame, then the boy heals him with water from the stream. Meanwhile, the narrator reveals to Platero the details of his childhood through the street where he lived and the landscape during a sunset.

Spring (XXV-LXIV)

At the arrival of spring, the protagonist observes the field and describes the characteristics of the season. At this time the young man and the donkey live different adventures, among which are: the day they witness how a guard kills a dog because he has scabies. In the month of April, Platero enjoys the field full of flowers while eating them.

Also, the protagonists are witnesses of how the green canary escapes from his cage and manages to fly.

One day, the young man discovers that a leech makes Platero not stop bleeding, when he removes it, the animal improves. Later, they witness how the cars go to the Romería del Rocío.

Summer (LXV-LXXXIV)

The narrator describes the characteristics of this season and also how Platero drips blood from the bites of horseflies.

During the summer, the protagonists live the following adventures: the day they witness a very strong storm; the arrival of the harvest time, while the narrator discovers the different tasks in the field and in the wineries of the area.

In September, Platero and the young man go to a party with fireworks, the animal is frightened by the noise. In this same month, the narrator tells how one of the village girls who played with the donkey dies. Soon it also describes the death of the canary.

Autumn (LXXXV-CXVII)

The entrance to this station makes Platero increasingly lazy. In October, the children go back to school and do not play in the street. This fact makes the donkey and the young man bored.

In one of the usual walks, the narrator and Platero discover a forgotten bunch of grapes, when it is no longer the harvest season, and they eat it.

In November, the narrator and Platero collect wood for the fireplace. Soon they both fall ill and the narrator describes the sound of the streets from his room.

Winter (CXVIII-CXXXVIII)

When winter comes, the narrator describes a rainy day from his house. In this station, the protagonists live the following adventures: the night they go out to gaze at the stars while the rest of the town takes shelter from the cold of the night; the Three Kings Day, which the protagonist receives with nostalgia; on Carnival Monday, when the children dress up and the streets fill with people, the noise does not please the protagonists.

At the end, during the last chapters, Platero dies and the narrator is left alone and nostalgic, while he hopes that the donkey is still there.

Analysis

Platero and me It is a book that consists of 138 rather short chapters, barely exceeding two pages. It is an inexhaustible source of expressive resources. He stands out for his handling of syntax and the use of a rich language in which adjectives and literary resources such as metaphors abound.

Themes and values

Some specialists believe that the story is a kind of diary in which Jiménez exposes part of his life during childhood, his way of thinking and acting.

However, the book is not a journal, although it may reflect many of the author's own experiences throughout the text.

The work is not an easy text for children's reading, since it reflects on life, illness or death. Likewise, the book is full of themes and implicit values, among which we can highlight:

• Friendship and love: it occurs with the relationship between the narrator and the Platero donkey. Both characters, who are always together, show great complicity and affinity.
• The goodness: It is shown in the behavior of the protagonists, who behave in a respectful way and help those who need it most.
• Pain and suffering: the plot supposes an incessant preposition between two ways of seeing life. On the one hand, Platero's is naive and unconscious like a child's. On the other hand, that of the man who is aware of pain and suffering, like an adult.
• Loneliness: accompanies the narrator and Platero during the play. On the one hand, the loneliness that both characters have with respect to the rest of the world. On the other hand, it occurs when the donkey dies and the narrator is left empty.

Literary resources

The narrative of Juan Ramón Jiménez, in Platero and me, is characterized by the large amount of details, descriptions and use of literary resources used throughout the text, poetic images also abound.

These resources invite the reader to go beyond the simple imagination of what the scenarios are like and how the events occurred.

The author makes use of the metaphor, a literary figure that establishes a relationship of similarity between a real term and an imaginary one. For example, here it refers to sunrise:

It seems that we are inside a great honeycomb of light, that it is the interior of an immense and warm fiery rose.

The use of hyperboles is also frequent. This literary figure consists of exaggerating qualities or characteristics. For example, he uses hyperbole to magnify Platero's qualities:

Platero is small, hairy, soft; so soft on the outside, that you would say all made of cotton that does not have bones.

The use of similes to establish relationships between real and imaginary elements:

Later, the vast sky was like a transparent sapphire, changed into emerald.

The richness of language

Another aspect to highlight of Platero and me is that the author makes use of a wide and rich vocabulary. In some cases, Juan Ramón Jiménez uses invented words and expressions and words typical of the autochthonous vocabulary of Andalusia.

The lexical and phonetic modifications of the Andalusian dialect are also frequent, we find examples like this one, included in the chapter “La tísica” (XLVI):

"When I go to the bridge," he told me, "I already saw you, little darling, that's where I'm going! I'm drowning ...

Platero and I characters

• Silversmith: He is the poet's donkey. According to the text Platero is in appearance small, furry and soft. Soft as if it were made of cotton and with eyes black and shiny as jet. His name comes from the expression "silver donkeys", which was used to indicate certain types of donkeys in the Autonomous Community of Andalusia, Spain.
• "Me": he is the narrator of the story, who tells and describes what happens throughout the text and exposes what he is like and how much he loves Platero. He apparently seems like a sensitive, lonely character who presents himself as a young man "dressed in mourning, with a Nazarene beard and a short black hat.

However, throughout the book more characters appear but with little participation. Among them, the parrot, the bitch Diana, the mangy dog, the children, the green canary, the goat, the bride, among other animals and people.

Biography of Juan Ramón Jiménez

Juan Ramón Jiménez was a Spanish poet, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He was born in Moguer (Huelva) on December 23, 1881 into a wealthy family. This fact allowed him to be educated in the best schools in the region. In his youth he moved to Seville to study Law by family imposition, where he began to be interested in painting and later in poetry.

At the age of nineteen he left for Madrid, where he published his first two books. Nymphaeas and Souls of Violet. That same year, the death of his father caused him to fall into a depression and he had to enter different sanitariums.

Years later, at the beginning of the Civil War, he went into exile to the United States, Cuba and, finally, he went to Puerto Rico, where he remained until his death in 1958. Among his most outstanding works are:

• Nymphaeas and Souls of Violet (1900)
• Rhymes (1902)
• Sad arias (1903)
• Distant gardens (1904)
• Elegies (1908)
• Forgetfulness (1909)
• The sonorous loneliness (1911)
• Sorrowful and magical poems (1911)
• Labyrinth (1913)
• Platero and me (1914)
• Diary of a newly married poet (1917)