The theme of tyranny and alienation shows how a dictatorship not only alienates and "others" the people in the country, but also prevents the country itself from achieving European modernization. In a 1967 essay, literary critic Ariel Dorfman argues that "dictatorship, which in manifested itself in the political realm, is now a dictatorship of fire of the word, but always a tyranny that men themselves ask for, adore, and help to build". Dorfman also notes that "The 'little human bundles' of Asturias's world end up destroying themselves, being disintegrated by the very forces that they themselves spoke." By this he means that the characters are undone by their own actions and words as the President uses and twists them. The tyranny of language perversely parallels the political oppression which is omnipresent in Asturias's world. Richard Franklin argues that "in a philosophical sense, Asturias has eloquently affirmed the validity of individual experience".
