Plot
In Alejo Carpentier’s The Fugitives, an escaped slave and a tracking dog, both fugitives from the plantation, form an unexpected alliance in the thick Caribbean jungle. Together they survive in the jungle, hunting, fleeing, sharing shelter and hunger, until their coexistence transforms into a complex bond marked by instinct, fear, and memories of the past. As time passes, Cimarrón becomes increasingly reckless, approaching villages, stealing, and searching for women, until he is recaptured. Perro, more withdrawn, adapts to life in the wild and ends up joining a pack of jíbaro dogs. When Cimarrón manages to escape again and is reunited with his old companion, he tries to win him back with a gesture of affection, but Perro, obeying a conditioned reflex from the old overseer’s command, attacks and kills him. The story ends with the dog and his new pack playing among the remains of the slave, while the jungle regains its silence.
Summary of The Fugitives by Alejo Carpentier
In the heart of a sugar plantation in colonial Caribbean, a tracking dog—simply called Perro—follows the trail of a cimarrón, a fugitive slave. However, something distracts him: the scent of a female in heat, whose presence deeply disturbs him. This instinctive impulse leads him away from his goal, confuses him, and sends him into the woods, where he loses his bearings and unexpectedly finds the fugitive slave asleep. Instead of attacking him, Perro stays with him. The distant threat of other wild dogs prompts him to seek protection in the man’s vicinity, and together they spend the night huddled together, as equals.
From then on, Perro and Cimarrón—as the slave is named—begin a strange and supportive coexistence. Both are on the run, and both find comfort and companionship in each other’s presence. Their bond grows stronger as they learn to survive in the jungle. They hunt together, share food and shelter, and adapt to the unpredictable rhythm of the forest. But when Perro unearths some human bones in the cave where they live, Cimarrón’s ancestral fear forces him to seek another refuge. Even so, they remain together.
One day, hearing a car pulled by a mare from the plantation, Perro playfully runs after it. His sudden appearance causes an accident: the priest and the driver are injured. Cimarrón takes advantage of the chaos to strip them of their belongings. That night, he wraps himself in the priest’s cassock and relives, in his dreams, the lost pleasures of city life, especially the memory of women. But the scene also heralds his growing recklessness.
With the arrival of spring, lust takes hold of both of them. Cimarrón goes down to the village in search of a woman; Perro follows the trail of a female dog. Both get what they want: Cimarrón attacks a slave girl and Perro seduces an English bitch from the plantation. But this return to the human world marks the beginning of their downfall. Cimarrón begins to prowl the villages, attacking travelers, stealing, and exposing himself more and more to punishment. He lives a tense, paranoid life, machete in hand. Perro accompanies him, although he begins to distance himself: he is increasingly repulsed by the smells and customs of the human world.
Finally, during one of his escapades, Cimarrón is captured. They drag him naked and wounded out of a hut where he was seeking refuge and take him back to the plantation amid blows and insults. Perro flees and watches from afar as he passes by in chains. From then on, he lives alone in the mountains. He has lost weight and strength, but he has also lost the need to obey. He hunts what he can, takes refuge in inaccessible places, and begins to forget the bell of the plantation, the smell of his master, and the slogans he learned.
Until, with the arrival of a new spring, Perro once again senses the scent of a female. This force draws him back to a ravine, where he faces a pack of wild dogs. He fights fiercely, wins, and earns a place in the pack. He has left all domestication behind.
One day, the pack finds the trail of a human. It is Cimarrón, who has escaped again, with the chains still hanging from him. He recognizes Perro and calls to him joyfully. The animal sniffs him, circles him, seems to hesitate, but finally remembers an old command from the foreman: attack the fugitive slave. Perro jumps on Cimarrón’s neck and kills him.
The story ends with Perro and his new companion—the gray dog—playing with the dead man’s rags, while the pack sleeps among the bones. The forest keeps the silence of the irreparable.
Characters from The Fugitives by Alejo Carpentier
El Cimarrón, a black slave who has escaped from the plantation, represents the desperate search for freedom in a context of brutal oppression. His escape is not only physical, but also existential: he escapes punishment, submission, and the system that dehumanizes him. However, the story presents him more as a mythical figure than as a character with a voice or personal history. He is an intense, silent presence, always on the verge of collapse or explosion. His past is barely hinted at in brief details—his memories of women, the Christmas bonus, life in the village—and it is in his current behavior, distrustful and erratic, that his tragedy is revealed. He has tender gestures, such as when he hugs Perro while he sleeps, but he is also violent and reckless. As the story progresses, his behavior becomes more reckless and self-destructive. He exposes himself, attacks, steals, and desperately seeks women. His downfall seems inevitable, as if the very system that marked him had left him no other fate than death or recapture. The contradiction between his desire for freedom and the impulses conditioned by his slave past runs through his entire arc.
Perro, for his part, is the most complex character in the story. Although he is an animal, Carpentier portrays him with a psychological depth that exceeds the purely instinctive. At first, he is a tracking dog trained to hunt slaves. He obeys orders that he no longer remembers clearly, but which remain inscribed in his body, like conditioned reflexes. His encounter with the cimarrón does not lead him to attack him, but to seek warmth, companionship, and protection. Thus begins a process of transformation that takes him away from his original function and turns him into an almost free being. He learns to live in the mountains, to hunt, to disobey. But this process is neither linear nor certain: his identity is fragmented between loyalty to his absent master, sexual desire, the need to survive, and his new life alongside the fugitive man. The final scene, in which Perro kills Cimarrón, is not a return to his former role, but the brutal manifestation of an unresolved conflict: in the absence of a master, he obeys an ancient command, embedded like a spring in his memory. His act is a mixture of betrayal, automatism, and tragedy. In the end, Perro has not won his freedom, but has been absorbed by the savage logic of the pack.
Literary analysis of The Fugitives by Alejo Carpentier
What genre and subgenres does the work belong to?
The Fugitives is a short story that falls within the narrative genre, with a clear inclination towards realistic narrative, although nuanced by symbolic and allegorical elements. The story is structured as an adventure narrative in which two characters—a fugitive slave and a tracking dog—escape civilization and survive in the mountains. However, this is not a conventional action story. The story shifts its focus to a profound exploration of animal and human behavior, of the instincts, conditioning, and impulses that guide behavior. For this reason, it can also be considered a psychological and philosophical tale, in which the apparent fable conceals a meditation on freedom, obedience, and memory. Although the story is firmly rooted in the historical world of the colonial Caribbean, its treatment is not documentary or testimonial, but deeply literary, with a perspective that transcends the immediate to suggest universal meanings.
Where does the story take place?
The story takes place in a tropical region of the Caribbean during colonial times. The physical space is composed of three main areas: the sugar mill, the mountains, and the deep jungle. The mill, although never described in detail, appears as a center of power, order, and control, with its bells, whips, barracks, communal kitchens, priests, and overseers. It is a space that imposes a rhythm and structure, marked by violence, surveillance, and routine. It is also the place of origin of the protagonists, a familiar world that, even at a distance, continues to influence them through memory and instilled obedience.
The hills represent the intermediate space: it is no longer the plantation, but neither is it the untamed jungle. It is the realm of transition, movement, and adaptation. There, they begin to organize their lives outside the established order, to improvise, to build a new, albeit precarious, routine.
The jungle, on the other hand, is presented as an almost autonomous world, prior to civilization, governed by its own natural laws.
It is a place of enormous symbolic power: there are no human hierarchies, but there are instincts, dangers, hunger, sex, and death. It is a space that does not guarantee freedom, but rather imposes another form of submission, closer to the biological than to the social. The story moves within this constantly shifting map, where each space not only houses the action, but also actively contributes to its meaning.
What kind of narrator does the story have?
The narrator is omniscient in the third person, but does not adopt a neutral perspective. Throughout the story, the narrative voice comes remarkably close to Perro’s sensory perception, allowing the reader to experience the story from a physical, instinctive, immediate point of view. The focus shifts, but animal subjectivity clearly predominates. The text naturally incorporates the smells, sounds, and stimuli that guide the animal’s behavior, constructing a non-human point of view that is nevertheless completely legible and understandable to the reader.
At other times, the focus shifts to Cimarrón, although without penetrating his consciousness with the same depth. The narrator never abandons his external character, but suggests intentions, memories, and fears through the description of gestures, reactions, and routines. This alternation of perspectives—focused on bodies rather than discourse—allows the story to maintain a constant tension between action and reflection, without resorting to interior monologue or dialogue.
What are the main themes developed by the author in the story?
One of the central themes of the story is freedom. Both Perro and Cimarrón are beings who are fleeing: the former from the plantation and his former masters; the latter from the slave system that chained him. However, the story problematizes this escape, showing that freedom is not simply the abandonment of a physical place, but a much more complex process that involves breaking with habits, reflexes, and ingrained instructions. Neither the slave nor the dog manages to completely detach themselves from their past. The former falls back into self-destructive behavior; the latter ends up obeying an old command without fully understanding it.
Another fundamental theme is that of instinct and domestication. Carpentier portrays his characters from a perspective in which the animal and the human are intertwined. The behavior of both is guided by biological needs—hunger, desire, fear—but also by learning that shapes their responses. The story explores the tension between natural impulse and acquired obedience, showing how even in the deepest jungle the conditioning of civilization persists, setting limits and dictating behavior. This reflection is particularly evident in the dénouement, when Perro, apparently freed from his initial role, remembers—or rather relives—the command to attack fugitive slaves.
The theme of bodily memory is also present. The past is not remembered with words, but with gestures, smells, reflexes. The bell of the plantation, the smells of the overseer, the fear of the whip, the willingness to obey: all this survives in the bodies, even when the characters have physically left that world. The story shows how oppression leaves deep, difficult-to-erase marks that manifest themselves even when there are no longer any masters or visible chains.
What writing style and techniques does the author use?
Carpentier’s style in this story is rich, dense, and full of sensory nuances. The prose is composed of long, slow-paced sentences that accumulate images and detailed descriptions. Physical sensations predominate: smell is the most important sense, as if the story were told from the perspective of smell, following trails, capturing essences, differentiating individuals by what they emit into the air. This technique helps to immerse the reader in the animal perspective of Perro without the need to humanize the character.
The author avoids dialogue and introspective language. The story is constructed through actions, situations that reveal emotions and motivations. He also uses symbolic devices—such as the sugar mill bell, broken chains, the priest’s cassock, the torn shirt—that give the story a broader, metaphorical dimension without falling into forced allegory.
Carpentier also uses contrast as a narrative technique: civilization and the jungle, obedience and freedom, man and animal, masculine and feminine, order and chaos. Through these pairs, he does not present a simplistic dichotomy, but rather shows how the boundaries between the two sides are porous, how the human can become animalistic and the animal can obey human orders. In this sense, the story functions as an inverted fable, where there is no moral, but rather a profound concern about the condition of beings subjected to systems of power.
Reading guide: For what ages and audience would Alejo Carpentier’s story The Fugitives be recommended?
Alejo Carpentier’s short story “The Fugitives” is not intended for children or young adults. It is a complex narrative, both in terms of its stylistic structure and the themes it addresses, and is therefore more suitable for young adult readers aged 16 and above, and especially for adults. Its language is dense, full of sensory nuances, with a sustained use of baroque prose that requires a certain reading maturity and literary sensitivity to be appreciated in all its expressive richness. The absence of dialogue, the focus on the animal point of view, and the sober and symbolic tone of the narrative may make it difficult to understand for readers who are not experienced in demanding literary texts.
In addition to the stylistic challenge, the story presents strong thematic content that requires a certain emotional and intellectual preparation. The story deals with slavery, physical and psychological violence, colonial repression, instinct, sexual desire, and betrayal. These themes are not explicitly graphic or crude, but they are treated with an intensity that may be disturbing to very young readers or those unfamiliar with the complexity of Latin American social history. The link between man and animal, the moral ambiguity of their actions, and the brutal outcome require a thoughtful reading that can grasp the symbolic implications of the story without resorting to simplifications.
For these reasons, “The Fugitives” is especially suitable for readers interested in Latin American literature, colonial history, or stories that explore the tensions between freedom and obedience, nature and culture. It can be a particularly rewarding read in advanced secondary or university educational contexts where critical discussion of its themes is encouraged. It is also recommended for adult readers looking for a short but dense story capable of leaving a lasting impression and provoking deep reflection on the human condition.
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