It Was Doubles: Strategies of Sense Production in Rudolfo Anaya's "the Man Who Found a Pistol"‪.‬

The theoretical premise of this study is grounded on one of the axioms in the hermeneutic perspective of structuralism and semiotics alike, namely, that the literary text functions as a self-sufficient mechanism of communication; hence, the primary attention accorded to this mechanism in the search for the text's meaning. The modus operandi, therefore, is initially inductive. The analysis of the double as the overriding structural paradigm leads to an interpretative hypothesis which a second stage, intertextual in character and concentrating on relevant contextual elements, further supports and expands: "The Man Who Found a Pistol" constitutes a profound metanarrative statement of aesthetics on the part of an author who straddles two languages, two cultures, and two literary traditions. "The Man Who Found a Pistol" was first published in 1992 in Mirrors Beneath the Earth: Short Fiction by Chicano Writers, edited by Ray Gonzalez. It was later included in The Anaya Reader (1955). For the purpose of the present analysis, a brief summary of the fabula may be helpful.