The author has called "The Jaguar" an extravagant story." He employs an extravagant style to stress the irony of his heroine`s attempt to preserve a false image of her moral superiority in the process of promoting selfish ends.

The historical events referred to in Dimitra`s of herself and her family belong to the Second World Wi1r period. Dimitra, a mathematics teacher, had been an active member of the leftist resistance movement during the Nazi occupation of Greece and was persecuted as a communist in the civil war that followed. Years later, she likes to think, of herself as an uncompromising individual engaged in a noble struggle to promote the ideals of a socialist revolution.

The unexpected return of her sister-in-Iaw Philio from America to claim an inheritance forces her to take a good look at the past. Her breathless interior monologue throughout the night of her confrontation with Philio reveals Dimitra`s obstinate refusal to accept the "bourgeois" compromises she has meanwhile made and has been comfortably living with for the past ten years.

The extravagant melodrama of Dimitra`s rhetoric often becomes a caricature of dialectic reasoning, a comic version of double-think paring reality to make it fit within the confines` of wishful thinking and self-righteousness. When the verbal torrent is finally spent., the comedy fades leaving a bitter after-taste of the pathos of self-deception.

In native South American religion the jaguar was regarded as a fierce deity representing forces of war, destruction and human sacrifice.