44 pages • 1 hour read
Miguel de UnamunoSaint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1930A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Page 58Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
Content Warning: The text addresses themes of death by suicide and suicidal ideation alongside employing outdated and offensive terminology regarding people with disabilities.
Miguel de Unamuno positions himself as the narrator and asserts that his work, Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr, is one of his best pieces and a true representation of his style. He deliberately wrote the story in a philosophical and shadowy manner, avoiding physical descriptions so that readers can exercise their imagination. Unamuno aimed to express the tragedy of everyday life, even in its most mundane moments.
The setting was inspired by the lake in San Martín de la Castañeda, situated in Sanabria, where a legend of a submerged city named Valverde de Lucerna exists. During his visit in 1930, he expressed his sadness about the lake in two poems. The nearby villages, including Riba de Lago, lay in a state of destitution. The village was made up of shacks with mud walls, and the locals could not fish in the lake due to a wealthy landowner who claimed exclusive rights. Although the author’s Valverde de Lucerna was inspired by these villages, none of them directly correspond to the setting in his story.
Unamuno states that he does not wish to add much to the already tragic story since it speaks for itself. However, he remembers a Parisian lady who once asked a priest if he believed in Hell. To this, the priest replied, “But why are you so concerned, Madame, about whether there is a Hell or not, if there is no one in it?” (44)
Unamuno’s desire was to write something that would not only last through time, but also capture the essence of the daily tragedies that every person experiences rather than focusing on mere pretty descriptions. He emphasizes the question of who we are and what we will become when we are gone.
Unamuno’s state of mind while writing the story and since that time has greatly influenced the story and the author. The story deals with the idea of achieving immortality through memory and legacy and tackles the problem of the soul and personality. The journey of Don Quixote mirrors Don Manuel’s in the sense that their stories both end with their martyrdom.
Unamuno prays that the reader “meet [themselves].”
Pages 49-58 Summary
Angela Carballino recounts her experiences with Don Manuel, the parish priest of Valverde de Lucerna, as the diocese of Renada starts the process of his beatification.
Angela lost her father in childhood. He introduced her to literature like Don Quixote and Bertoldo, unlike her deeply religious mother, who revered Don Manuel. At 10, before attending a convent school in Renada, Angela admired Don Manuel, then 37, for his unique connection with children and his engaging talks on practical matters. Her brother, Lázaro, was living in America and indifferent to religion; he insisted on her education at the convent school as the best available option, fearing that staying in the village would hinder her cultural and intellectual development.
During her five-year stay at the convent, Angela’s curiosity and doubts grew, fueled by her father’s books. She befriended a girl who was fascinated by Don Manuel, urging Angela to write to her about him when she returned to the village, which Angela did when she was 15 years old.
Angela explains that Don Manuel became a priest to support his widowed sister’s children and chose to serve in Valverde de Lucerna out of love for the village and its inhabitants, though his brilliance could have allowed him to go elsewhere. Angela recounts a tale in which Aunt Rabona’s daughter, having returned to the village with a child born outside of marriage, was encouraged by Don Manuel to reunite with Perote, her former boyfriend. Persuaded by Don Manuel, Perote adopted the child and married his ex-girlfriend. Now, as Perote faces illness and immobility, he receives care from the son he accepted.
Famed for healing villagers by the lake on Saint John’s Night, Don Manuel attracted people from afar seeking cures. When a mother implored him for a miracle, he humbly declined, stating his lack of divine sanction to perform miracles.
Don Manuel valued neatness, often advising those with torn clothes to repair them and providing shirts to those in need. He approached everyone with equal kindness, including Blasillo, a villager with an intellectual disability whom he educated and cared for. In turn, Blasillo would lovingly mimic the priest. Don Manuel’s public cry of despair during the Good Friday Liturgy, “My God, my God! Why hast Thou forsaken me?” (57), deeply affected the congregation and caused widespread sorrow when Blasillo repeated these words around the village.
The judge from another town once summoned Don Manuel, who was known for his integrity, to extract a confession from a suspect. Don Manuel refused, stating that he wouldn’t extract the truth just to punish the man. He made it clear that “human justice” was not his business. Before leaving, he advised the suspected man to seek forgiveness from God since that was the only thing that truly mattered.
Prologue-Page 58 Analysis
The novella’s opening pages set up a stark contrast between the old and the new, embodied by the characters’ divergent beliefs and the village’s evolving dynamics. The contrasting characters and ideologies represented by Angela’s family and Don Manuel are particularly salient. Angela’s father, a figure of the new world, has progressive ideas and knowledge that starkly contrast with the traditional values of the village. His teachings, which Angela’s mother dismissively overlooks, symbolize the clash between emerging modern thought and established customs. This tension is amplified by Don Manuel’s influence over Angela’s mother, which leads her to forsake her husband’s teachings in favor of traditional religious practices: “[Don Manuel] had made her forget the doings and sayings of her husband, whose soul she commended, fervently, to God, as she said her daily rosary” (51). This narrative strategy not only underscores the conflict between innovation and tradition, but also illustrates how Don Manuel’s charismatic authority sways the village toward collective ignorance of the new world’s secular values. Lázaro, Angela’s brother, embodies the new world’s secular and progressive thought, mirroring his father’s ideology. He implicitly rejects the village’s religious orthodoxy, if only through his indifference: “Lázaro, did not much care for nuns” (51).
However, Don Manuel is not a one-dimensional stereotype of religious orthodoxy. The allusions to Don Quixote in the Prologue and Angela’s father’s ownership of the novel foreshadow Don Manuel’s role as a benevolent deceiver and a tragic figure caught in his own doubts. One quote from the Prologue directly addresses Don Manuel’s existential predicament: “If he were an impostor, his joke would be his; but if he were a doubter who would like to believe what he is expressing, his joke would then be entirely objective; existence would be mocking itself through him” (46). Like Quixote, Don Manuel is caught between the world as he wishes it to be and the world as it is, embodying the conflict between idealism and reality. This duality suggests that Don Manuel, much like Quixote, may be seen as both a noble figure striving for a higher truth and a tragic one, ensnared by the illusions of his own making. The reference to existence mocking itself through such a figure highlights the absurdity of the human condition and thus introduces The Tragedy of Consciousness: Unamuno suggests that one’s deepest convictions can lead to a profound sense of isolation and misunderstanding not just from others but from oneself.
Imagery and other details of characterization likewise suggest Don Manuel’s complexity. Unamuno describes Don Manuel’s eyes as having “all the blue depth of our lake” (51), which initially casts him in a positive light akin to the serene and deep lake (it also exemplifies the parallels the work draws between the landscape and the characters). However, the suggestion of depth also foreshadows Don Manuel’s hidden despair. Likewise, Don Manuel’s emphasis on physical cleanliness—he insists that “everyone should be neat and tidy” (55)—contrasts sharply with Jesus’s prioritization inner purity over outward appearances, most notably in Matthew 23:25-26. This juxtaposition highlights a critical aspect of Don Manuel’s character: His struggle with internal doubts forces him to focus on external symbols of purity and order. Unamuno uses this contrast to underscore the irony of Don Manuel’s position. Despite his role as a spiritual leader, Don Manuel mirrors the Pharisees’ emphasis on the external, reflecting his inability to attain the spiritual purity he preaches.
Don Manuel’s utterance of Jesus’s words of abandonment from the cross provoke a visceral reaction for those who hear it: “[A] deep shudder went through all the people, as when a lashing north wind moves over the waters of the lake” (57). The passage foreshadows the revelation of Don Manuel’s disbelief but also accentuates Angela’s growing understanding and analytical depth. The simile, which employs natural imagery of the wind stirring the lake into turmoil, evokes the communal and internal upheaval triggered by Don Manuel’s crisis of faith. A comparison of Don Manuel’s mother to the Mater Dolorosa, “her heart pierced by seven swords” as she listens to her son speak Jesus’s words from the cross (57), deepens the biblical parallel. This allusion foreshadows Don Manuel’s spiritual martyrdom and underscores the narrative’s exploration of Saintliness, Legacy, and Mortality.
