The salmons path. The memory process

Abstract

The short story <i>Madre, no entiendo a los salmones</i> (1990), written by Montserrat Roig, presents a republican’s narrative reported to Norma, the protagonist, who resorts to different times in order to perform a complex reminiscence process. The movement salmons make from the sea to the river where they were born works as a symbol of this process. The present paper intends to analyze how the different narrative levels relate and reflects on the importance of memory in these characters’ lives. We take into account the role played by a nonhuman animal in a literary text that represents the period after the Spanish Civil War and the suffocation of the past of thousands of republicans in Nazi concentration camps.