What This Theme Explores
Grief, Trauma, and Desensitization asks how people survive the unendurable—and what that survival costs. In a world where atrocity is routinized, numbness becomes both armor and infection, protecting the self while corroding empathy. Through Marcos Tejo, the novel tests whether personal mourning can be contained when the entire society has institutionalized horror. It suggests that unprocessed grief does not go quiet; it mutates into complicity, then violence.
How It Develops
At the outset, Marcos is a man split between public and private catastrophes: the societal “Transition” that legalized the slaughter of humans for meat, and the intimate devastation of losing his infant son. In the early chapters, he manages the processing plant by deliberately muting his feelings, wishing he could extend that anesthetization to his home life (Chapter 1). His separation from Cecilia makes his grief reverberate in a vacuum, and the numbness he cultivates at work begins to seep into every space his loss once haunted.
Midway through, the arrival of Jasmine fractures that numbness. Caring for her coerces an intimacy he has denied himself, reawakening tenderness even as the world keeps pressing on his rawest wounds. Visits to his father, Don Armando, now cognitively broken by an inability to cope with the Transition, and encounters with his sister, Marisa, who performs an almost theatrical denial, surround Marcos with incompatible responses to trauma. When he destroys his dead child’s cot in a burst of fury, it reads less as catharsis than as the moment his grief goes underground, hardening into something immovable.
By the end, the very desensitization that once let Marcos function completes its transformation of him. The birth of his child with Jasmine offers a fragile alternative: to choose attachment over avoidance, and healing over repetition. Instead, Marcos reroutes his grief into domination. He reclassifies Jasmine as a “domesticated animal” and sacrifices her to restore an image of family, proving that numbness has not cured his pain; it has turned him into what the system requires.
Key Examples
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The core wound: Marcos’s son Leo dies in his sleep, and the loss remains unassimilable. The novel insists that Marcos’s routines, however disciplined, cannot metabolize this pain.
One can get used to almost anything, except the death of a child.
How many humans do they have to slaughter for him to forget how he laid Leo down in his cot... and the next day saw he had died in his sleep? How many hearts need to be stored in boxes for the pain to be transformed into something else? But the pain, he intuits, is the only thing that keeps him breathing.
(Chapter 13)
The passage frames grief as paradoxically sustaining: the one feeling he refuses to relinquish, even as everything else is blunted. -
Societal desensitization: The Transition rapidly normalizes mass slaughter, outpacing many people’s psychological capacity to adapt.
The doctors diagnosed him with senile dementia, but he knows his father couldn’t handle the Transition. Many people suered an acute depression and gave up on life, others dissociated themselves from reality, some simply committed suicide.
(Chapter 2)
The spectrum of collapse—depression, dissociation, suicide—shows the social scale of trauma and how numbness becomes a sanctioned response. -
The burning of the cot: Marcos’s destruction of the cot enacts the fantasy that grief can be incinerated with its objects. Yet his subsequent dream of a weight lodged inside him reveals the failure of that ritual; the pain has only changed form. The moment marks the pivot from visible mourning to internal calcification (Chapter 17).
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The final act: After witnessing his son’s birth, Marcos kills Jasmine, justifying the act through the categories of his profession.
As he drags the body of the female to the barn to slaughter it, he says to Cecilia, his voice radiant, so pure it wounds: “She had the human look of a domesticated animal.”
(Chapter 19, Part 2)
The “radiant” voice exposes the terrifying clarity of a man whose empathy has been inverted into pride in control.
Character Connections
Marcos Tejo embodies the book’s central paradox: he clings to grief as his last tether to humanity, yet lets desensitization dictate his actions. His tenderness toward Jasmine briefly unsettles his defenses, but he ultimately converts love into possession and mourning into violence. The arc shows how sustained numbness doesn’t neutralize pain; it weaponizes it.
Cecilia illustrates the opposite failure mode—a person unable to armor herself at all. Consumed by the loss of Leo, she withdraws from daily life, showing that without some form of psychic insulation, trauma can immobilize rather than mutate. Her absence becomes another absence Marcos tries to fill with control.
Don Armando’s dementia reads as a mind refusing the social bargain of numbness. Unable to reconcile the Transition with his moral framework, his psyche opts for fracture over adaptation. He becomes a living index of those who cannot desensitize and are destroyed by the demand to do so.
Spanel performs a hyper-professionalized numbness—practical, cynical, and self-protective. “Today I’m the butcher, tomorrow I might be the cattle,” she says, accepting the world’s cruelty as a rotating role rather than an aberration (Chapter 6). Her fatalism is a survival strategy that mirrors the system so perfectly it offers no leverage to resist it.
Symbolic Elements
The empty cot concentrates Marcos’s grief into an object that both memorializes and tortures. Its destruction dramatizes the fantasy that symbols can be obliterated to purge feelings, but the aftermath proves that grief migrates; it doesn’t vanish.
The stone in his chest gives his unprocessed mourning a palpable weight. This recurring image—heavy, lodged, inassimilable—turns trauma into part of the body’s architecture, something carried rather than cured (Chapter 18).
The abandoned zoo functions as a ruin of prior moral orders. It recalls a time when humans still recognized animals as nonhuman others; in its decay, it mirrors a society that has collapsed the boundary altogether, and with it, the categories that once restrained violence (Chapter 8).
Contemporary Relevance
In an age saturated with images of war, ecological disaster, and systemic violence, the novel’s portrait of compassion fatigue feels eerily familiar. It shows how institutions can convert ethical shock into routine, and how individuals adapt by narrowing the range of what they can feel. The book also interrogates consumption, language, and policy—how naming practices and bureaucratic euphemisms ease the public into accepting the unacceptable. Bazterrica’s warning is blunt: if we protect ourselves from pain by numbing to others’ suffering, we risk building systems that perpetuate the very harms we claim to survive.
Essential Quote
One can get used to almost anything, except the death of a child.
How many humans do they have to slaughter for him to forget how he laid Leo down in his cot... and the next day saw he had died in his sleep? How many hearts need to be stored in boxes for the pain to be transformed into something else? But the pain, he intuits, is the only thing that keeps him breathing.
This passage crystallizes the theme’s paradox: numbness can normalize atrocity, but grief resists normalization. Marcos’s pain becomes both his last proof of humanity and the hurt he tries to master through desensitization—until that mastery turns him into the instrument of new harm.