PARATEXTUAL RELATIONSHIPS AND CULTURAL TEXTS IN A WORLD FOR JULIUS

Abstract

This article analyzes Alfredo Bryce Echenique’s novel Un mundo para Julius from a semiotic and sociocultural perspective, focusing on paratextual relationships and the role of specific cultural texts that structurally interact with the novel. The author argues that the epigraphs—a German proverb and excerpts from Jean Anouilh and Roger Vailland—do not serve a decorative function but rather form a paratextual microsystem that decisively guides meaning production. Through an analysis of Julius’s actantial itinerary, the study shows that the protagonist’s attraction to what is forbidden and his constant transgressive actions reveal a structural tension between rupture and continuity, linked to the crisis of Peru’s oligarchic ancestral values. The article demonstrates how the novel represents a moment of paradigmatic transition, in which two axiological systems coexist: ancestral tradition and emerging values associated with mid-twentieth-century socioeconomic modernization in Peru. It also proposes that the narrative scheme of original sin functions as a premodeled cultural text that is fragmentarily reactivated in the novel, providing symbolic coherence to notions of transgression, guilt, and sanction. The article concludes that paratextual and intertextual relations reinforce the novel’s critical dimension and allow it to be understood as a complex representation of identity and class transformation processes.