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Amanda
Clara and Esteban Trueba’s son, Jaime and Blanca’s brother, Amanda’s boyfriend, and Alba’s uncle. Nicolás is Jaime’s twin, and he is the only one of Clara’s children to take an interest in spiritualism. Nicolás is handsome and incredibly smart, and he is constantly fighting with Jaime. Nicolás spends many weekends visiting the Mora sisters, where he first meets Amanda. Jaime and Nicolás slowly grow apart, and while Jaime is busy studying medicine, Nicolás dances flamenco and preaches free love. After Amanda becomes pregnant and Jaime performs her abortion, Nicolás and Amanda drift apart, too. When Alba is born, Nicolás takes an interest in her education, but with his strange hobbies of spiritualism, yoga, and smoking hashish, Esteban worries Alba will turn out “stark raving mad.” Like Marcos, Nicolás travels all over the world—he even spends a year in India as a beggar—but he returns home and opens a school, the Institution for Union with Nothingness, in which his students are in search of a philosophy to help them escape “earthly strife.” When Esteban discovers Alba with her head shaved bald and repeating the word “Om,” he puts Nicolás on a plane overseas and tells him to never come back. Despite being a man, Nicolás’s character also portrays the oppression of patriarchal society. Esteban, who is the personification of the patriarchy, considers “magic, like religion and cooking,” a “particularly feminine affair.” Nicolás doesn’t fit the patriarchal ideal of a man, and as such, his father effectively banishes him from his family.
Nicolás Trueba Quotes in The House of the Spirits
The The House of the Spirits quotes below are all either spoken by Nicolás Trueba or refer to Nicolás Trueba. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 6
Quotes
He was the son of Esteban García, the only bastard offspring of the patrón named for him. No one knew his origin, or the reason he had that name, except himself, because his grandmother, Pancha García, had managed before she died to poison his childhood with the story that if only his father had been born in place of Blanca, Jaime, or Nicolás, he would have inherited Tres Marías, and could even have been President of the Republic if he wanted. In that part of the country, which was littered with illegitimate children and even legitimate ones who had never met their fathers, he was probably the only one to grow up hating his last name. He hated Esteban Trueba, his seduced grandmother, his bastard father, and his own inexorable peasant fate.
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Explanation and Analysis:
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Nicolás Trueba Quotes in The House of the Spirits
The The House of the Spirits quotes below are all either spoken by Nicolás Trueba or refer to Nicolás Trueba. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 6
Quotes
He was the son of Esteban García, the only bastard offspring of the patrón named for him. No one knew his origin, or the reason he had that name, except himself, because his grandmother, Pancha García, had managed before she died to poison his childhood with the story that if only his father had been born in place of Blanca, Jaime, or Nicolás, he would have inherited Tres Marías, and could even have been President of the Republic if he wanted. In that part of the country, which was littered with illegitimate children and even legitimate ones who had never met their fathers, he was probably the only one to grow up hating his last name. He hated Esteban Trueba, his seduced grandmother, his bastard father, and his own inexorable peasant fate.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
