Anaconda

Anaconda is a story by the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga, published in 1921 and belonging to the book Anaconda y otros cuentos, which deals with the destruction caused by humans in the natural world.
Of brutal actuality, it narrates how vipers, representing human beings, constitute a threat to the environment.
At the beginning of the story a yarará snake discovers the presence of men in an old uninhabited building in the jungle. The event provokes a Congress of the Vipers to face the situation.
During the conclave they determine that it is necessary to attack humans to protect their lives, being the most convenient to kill their horses first. Only the Ñacaniná and Anaconda snakes believe, in a minority, that it would be more effective to attack first the dog that humans have brought because it is trained to hunt them and can be lethal.
The dispute between vipers and men is in Quiroga’s story a metaphor for human interference in nature and the extermination that this entails for wildlife.
The story could be divided, according to its internal structure, taking into account its eleven chapters, as follows:

• Introduction: consisting of the first chapter. The first character is introduced, the spatial and temporal location is introduced, and the arrival of man in the jungle is discovered.
• Knot/Development: consisting of chapters two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten. They describe the plans and struggles that vipers carry out to defeat humans and live in peace as they originally did.
• Outcome: constituted by chapter eleven. It recounts the last struggle between vipers and humans and the victory of the latter.

The title refers to one of the main characters in the story, and would therefore be a type of eponymous title. It could also have a metaphorical meaning, since being the Anaconda the strongest of all snakes (except for the Malayan python) could refer to the strength and resistance that snakes opposed to men.