The man driving the truck is called Cipriano Algor, he is a potter by profession and is sixty-four years old, although he certainly does not look his age.
A lot of information is conveyed in the opening line of the novel. Yes, it is for the most part narrated in the presented tense. Algor is a major character and pottery is going to play a far more important role than it may at first appear. What this line does not convey is the rich complexity of sentence structure—not to mention the difficulty—presented to the reader in making his way deeper into the text.
Oh, good morning, Senor Cipriano, she said, I've come to keep my promise and bring you your water jug, Thank you so much, but you really shouldn't have bothered, after our conversation in the cemetery yesterday, it struck me that people and things are much the same, they have a certain life span, they last for a while, then, like everything else in the world, they come to a sudden end
One of those difficulties and exhibitions of complexity, for instance, is the lack of traditional structural foundations regarding conversations. This excerpt is actually a conversation between two people, but it is lacking conventional literary signposts like quotation marks, periods, and paragraph breaks. Conversation flows naturally in chunks just like it does when actually speaking. People rarely speak in formal sentence structure during a conversation and the author is conveying this in his many scenes of dialogue. The nice thing is that it is still fairly easy to determine where the punctuation separating who is speaking should be.
"What a strange scene you describe
and what strange prisoners.
They are just like us."
The quote from Plato’s allegory of the cave precedes the narrative. The title of the novel draws its origin from Plato’s story: one of the most famous works of philosophy in the history of mankind. And, as might be expected, the story itself is modern refashioning of this allegorical tale centering on themes related to perception of the truth, the falsity of assumed knowledge, deception and inexplicably willful ignorance. Even so, it is not until the final concluding words of the book that the connection is explicitly made to Plato in utterly unambiguous terms.
You know as well as I do that the shops in the city are having a real struggle just to keep their heads above water, everyone does their shopping at the Center, more and more people want to live at the Center
The Center is the center of Saramago’s re-interpretation of Plato’s cave. The Center is pretty difficult to describe literally, but suffice to say it is like the Mall of America taken to its most logical extreme and multiplied in size exponentially. The plot revolves around the Center putting the kibosh on its order Cipriano’s pottery which forces him into a decision which drives the arc of the story directly into the rich thematic material supplied by Plato’s cave.
