This paper brings together the tale “Canciones para el incendio” of the colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez, with the hermeneutic thinking of Ricoeur supported, in some traits, by Husserl’s phenomenology. From a hermeneutic standpoint, the three-fold mimesis model enables the methodology developed in this paper, which unfolds into three approaches to the tale. The mimesis proposes three steps that include prefiguration, configuration and refiguration; issues that respond to the relationships between time lived and narrative. Its unfolding nestles in a sort of time relaxation, that brings closer the before and after of the narrative. The key questions are: what mimics the tale? mimesis I, how is it set up? mimesis II and, lastly, what does the refiguration of the tell means, when the reader inhabits in it? mimesis III. Vásquez’s work is impressive not only for its literary quality, but also for putting in the spotlight the most pitiful aspects of the historical reality of violence and exclusion that Colombia has endured, witnessing the poor democracy experience and secularization; values and truths that are scarcely instituted in this nation.
