Brain Pain discussion

This discussion covers Page 1 – 61, Last line: “Try to think nice thoughts, because we’re going to be a long time here in the ground.”

Juan Preciado travels in search of his father, Pedro Páramo, to fulfill his mother’s dying wish that he should “Make him pay, son, for all those years he put us out of his mind.” Abundio the donkey driver, leads Juan to his mother’s ancestral village of Comala. As day turns into night and back again, the voices of the dead speak through the cracks in the stone walls.

What is going on in Comala? Are any of the people Juan encounters among the living, or are they all restless ghosts?

The first thing that struck me was that while Rulfo was using the tropes of the Quest narrative: a son in search of his identity & legitimate rights from a long-separated father,yet unlike an epic neither the son nor the father ( at least going by what we've learnt about him till now) reach the mythic heights of heroes.
The prose reads like a long narrative poem but then Rulfo subverts it by fragmenting the narration & the readers' response to the text would be something akin to Juan's reactions to the happenings in Comala- confusion and dread.
We can imagine how the kid in The Sixth Sense felt when he said- "I see dead people- I see them all the time!"
Why didn't Juan make a run for his life when he first understood the reality of Comala's residents? Why didn't he just leave after knowing that Pedro Páramo is dead?

Mala wrote: "Why didn't Juan make a run for his life when he first understood the reality of Comala's residents? Why didn't he just leave after knowing that Pedro Páramo is dead? ..."

Spirits are a kind of integral part of Mexican culture, a mixture of native beliefs and catholic beliefs in spirit. Seeing dead people is kind of normal...

I imagine he didn't leave simply because he was there in that fictitious place of his childhood stories told by his mother and so maybe wanted to linger a bit and live the fiction.