• The judge of the slaughterhouse holds la suma del poder

• The state run as a cattle ranch

• From outset, the text ambiguously claims and eschews historical discourse

• Is the text claiming to be historical (historia as history), or fictive (historia as story)? Or both at once?

• Claims he will not begin with Noah's Ark, but proceeds to narrate an epic flood of Biblical proportions

• The nation is narrated in "the epistemological gaps that the non-science of history leaves open" (Sommer, 76)

Hybridity of genre

• Historical account?

• Political satire?

• Racist propaganda?

• Picaresque fascination with low-life?

• Costumbrismo (observation of customs, description of people, recording of popular speech)?

• The tormented Romantic (free-spirited) Unitarian is compared to wild animals and to the bull slaughtered earlier

• The Unitarian takes on contradictory attributes of civilización and barbarie

• The allegory collapses into a forced and unconvincing moral ending