Silence in Flowering Judas

I know I seem stuck on this silence thing, sorry guys! I was thinking about the use of silence in Flowering Judas, and the similarities between Flowering Judas and the Holiday. Obviously, the crucial difference is that the Holiday has a first person narrator, whereas Flowering Judas uses omniscient third-person. However, silence is used as both stylistic technique and plot device in both pieces. First of all, the backgrounds of both characters are kept quiet. The back story of the Holiday narrator is obscure, but Laura’s is even more so. From Laura, we only know that “learned to ride in Arizona.” That’s it. Zippo. What is she doing in Mexico? No one knows, not even, apparently, many of her fellow revolutionaries. Secondly, these characters have hardly any quoted speech in either of their stories. Laura speaks briefly to Braggioni, and a couple of lines to herself. Finally, since I’ve been examining silence as a function of individual and communal identities, I thought it was interesting that Laura is a silent, seemingly isolated individual in a foreign community. She is even physically isolated: Porter writes, “Nobody touches her.” She speaks the language, but the botched, nearly meaningless English of her students emphasizes an ongoing alienation. Is she, like the Holiday narrator, enjoying “the freedom to fold up in quiet and go back to [her] own center”? The obvious difference here is that Laura—despite her isolated, alienated position—clearly has a crucial role in her revolutionary community. She has immediate, physical use-value, for both the prisoners and Braggioni. The silent Laura is forced to absorb the parade of noise from the mouthy, whiny, musical Braggioni. Literally, in the last line of the story, Laura is woken by the sound of her own voice, which is not quoted and which has been so conspicuously absent from her story.