Che Guevera's Motorcycle Diaries

I really enjoyed the film the "Motorcycle Diaries" and learning about the history of Che Guevera. Before watching the film in class, I had never heard of him so I found the class discussions and the film to be very insightful. Watching the film and seeing Guevera and his friend Granado embark on this journey of traveling from country to country was interesting to see how Guevera developed as person after visiting each place. In class we learned that some people see this novel as a bildungsroman. A bildungsroman is referred to as a "coming of age" kind of story. In my opinion I definitely saw this text as a bildungsroman as well. This trip that he and his friend Alberto Granado embark on started off as something exciting and just for fun. However, as they began their travels and met different people in different areas, they came to realize that the world was so much more than what they were used to. Both men came from upper middle class families, Guevera was a medical student and Granado was a biochemist. They decided to take some time off from their studies and go on this trip, not really knowing what they would find. As they come to different countries and towns they meet several people that are not of their class, these people are poor. Coming from a class of the “haves” or otherwise known as the people to be and suddenly meeting a bunch of people that don’t look like you or live the way you do, the “have-nots” or the outcasts, was shocking to these men. As their travel continued and time carried on and they were interacting with more poor and sickly people, they decided to use their knowledge and background to help them and treat their illnesses the best they could. One example of this is when the men were traveling and came across an old man and his wife. The old man had a big lump protruding out of his neck that looked like a cancerous tumor. Guevera proceeded to tell the man that he was seriously sick and had a tumor but Granado was trying to tell him that it was not necessary to tell the old man this. From this scene I think it was one of the first times where we began to see Guevera maturing and really thinking about others and the bigger picture, rather than the world he came from. At the end of the film I think we see Guevera's his development come full circle when he is in the Leper Colony and chooses to live amongst the poor rather than stay on the island with doctors and nurses. He also makes a speech about how much he has learned from the course of his journey and from the people he has met in the Leper Colony and that he wanted everyone to be united. He realized that they were all the same people, regardless of lighter skin/darker skin, poor/rich and when he realized this and made that speech at the end of the film I think he had came out a more mature person than he was when he first went into it.