To what extent is Esteban Trueba a sympathetic character in 'house of spirits'?

Esteban seems to be the only man who really matters to three generations of women: Blanca never defies him to go live with her great love, fearing to give up her social position, and Alba loves a man who loves his cause more than her. Yet Esteban, who loves his family, fathers his own fate in a cruel and thoughtless way and, in supporting the coup, brings down tragedy on his granddaughter. On the other hand his casual kindness to Transito brings an unforeseen good; Esteban has a special relationship with his granddaughter, Alba because it seems that it is only with Alba that he can express some kind of tenderness, and only she is able to somehow control him with the help of Clara’s writing. “She heard Miguel's name but did not […] they beat her, manhandled her, pulled off her blouse, and she could no longer think, could only say no, no, and no and calculate how much longer she could resist before her strength gave out, not knowing this was only the beginning, until she felt herself begin to faint and the men left her alone, lying on the floor, for what seemed to her a very short time. “ This passage shows the disorientation of Alba, her exhaustions through the pace of the phrase, but especially the torture that she is experiencing from the people which seems to go on for a long time, then stop, but only ‘a very short time’ that fits with the pace in that sentence because I seems that the sentence is dragging on, until the last few words representing only the little time where she is left alone.

However in some ways Esteban could be interpreted as a sympathetic character rather than a villain is that even though spiritual creatures dominate the household despite his persistent materialism, Clara in contrary is indifferent towards the material world and in favor of the spiritual world, which maddens Esteban. Even though Esteban thinks spirits to be a fake, a part of him seems to just be jealous of Clara's connection to them: "He wanted far more than her body; he wanted control over that undefined and luminous material that lay within her and that escaped him even in those moments when she appeared to be dying of pleasure." Esteban realizes that Clara's spiritual connections are completely separate from him, meaning that he cannot control or be a part of them, which he shows through understanding this and later tolerate them.

In contrast he manages to show violence towards Clara as well, when he punches her and knocks three teeth out: ‘’He lost control and struck her in the face, knocking her against the wall. Clara fell to the floor without a sound. […] Two days later, Clara and Blanca left Tres Marías and returned to the capital. Esteban, humiliated and furious, remained with the sensation that something in his life had been destroyed forever.’’ At this point his relationships were already not great with people but when he ‘stuck her’, ‘knocking her’ it completely changes to a sever relationship with his wife. The verbs used are so cold and violent to describe his cruel act towards a person who loved him, show the sadness of this character, who keeps getting worse by destroying himself, which could be interpreted as reasons why he might be a sympathetic character.

Due to all those negative actions Esteban continually proves to be a bad person making it very hard to relate to him rather than to all those other characters, which he hurts. He controls the destinies of peasant women who live on his land and women of his own class, including those in his family. The rape of Pancha illustrates his position of ownership and control. He is the main character with Alba, which makes it hard to decide for sure whether or not he is sympathized with, but in a way she shows that now he is able to tell the story as it was and not change it, showing that he doesn’t just care about his image, but on the contrary he did all those horrible things, which made it really easy for the readers to sympathize with other characters which he was hurting.