The preceding analysis of Torquemada en la hoguera indicates how that language which the reader recognizes as figural necessarily draws him into an endless process of interpretation and re-interpretation. In this study I have attempted to show how the novels of Benito Pérez Galdós foster the play of these indeterminable, and interminable, processes of reading. These processes, as they conceal and reveal meaning, effect irony. The reader participates in this irony through his awareness that another, deferred meaning contests the apparent one. And that other meaning may itself give way to another, opposing significance.

In the portraits of characters both their perceptions and often those of their society are shown to be superficial. The chapter entitled ‘Navidad’ in La desheredada, for example, reveals the distortion of other's attitudes as well as Isidora's. Isidora eats Christmas dinner alone with her brother in her room, immersed in her delusions of nobility. The scene also illustrates the hypocrisy and cruelty of Isidora's aunt, who prohibits her from joining in the Christmas festival. It reflects, too, on the society's – and perhaps even the reader's – materialistic pursuit of holiday shopping and feasting rather than the values of the religion whose founder it commemorates. The narrator observes: