The Little School Literary Elements

Poetry, Fictionalized Autobiography

A small concentration camp in Argentina, 1977, during the Dirty War

Third-person limited omniscient. The narrator relates Alicia Partnoy's experiences in the third person but has access to her thoughts and feelings.

The tone is dark, cynical, and frequently hopeless.

Alicia Partnoy and the other prisoners are protagonists; the guards are antagonists.

Alicia and several other social workers accused of harboring leftist beliefs, or who are members of the Peronist political party, have been rounded up and arrested without a warrant. They are systematically tortured to provide information about Marxist guerrilla groups who are engaging in terrorist acts against the Argentine government, military, and citizens.

The climax of the book is when Alicia, after months of starvation and beatings and after witnessing the torture of her husband and several of her friends, is taken out of her room, given clothing and toiletries, and told to get cleaned up. She does not know whether she is going to be released, transferred, or executed.

There is not a great deal of foreshadowing in this book, because what happens to the prisoners tends to be extremely arbitrary and unpredictable. The narrative is not necessarily linear and the events as they are presented are not necessarily in sequence.

In a rare, forbidden moment of conversation, Alicia speaks to a male prisoner and says that she is hungry. In reality, she and the others are being starved: nobody is being given enough to eat, and such food as they are provided is not enough to live on.

Alicia and a female prisoner discuss a cure for the constipation they suffer as a result of their insufficient diet and lack of exercise. The other woman wants to put a picture of a despised leader in the toilet, and believes she will be far better able to move her bowels given an opportunity to do so in a way that shows the disrespect she feels toward him.

The flower on Alicia's shoe is one of the few things she is able to glimpse through the gap in her blindfold. It represents a perverse hope that at times seems out of place in her surroundings.

Blindfolding the prisoners for an extended period of time was a blatant abuse of human rights, and the people who did it should be held accountable, yet because the "Little School" was destroyed and the evidence of it covered up after the fact, the only people who are in a position to testify are the former prisoners. Because they were blindfolded, they cannot be certain of the identity of the people who tortured them.

Alicia's eventual release into another prison parallels the release of the Argentine people from the Dirty War. A change in location for Alicia did not translate into release, and a change in government for Argentina may have put an end to the Dirty War but it did not solve all the nation's problems or bring back most of the people who disappeared.

Although Partnoy describes some of the individual guards and visitors, such as one particularly hated individual who promises her a soft drink for her birthday and then fails to produce it. But for the most part the guards are faceless representatives of a brutal, sadistic collective. Because they follow a schedule at least nominally set by policy and rules, their actions are not interpreted as individual behaviors but as representations of a collective will.

The character Graciela personifies hope chiefly in a symbolic fashion because she is pregnant. But she gives birth while in captivity. The child she bears is taken away and quite probably adopted by some military family.