Cela’s novel, The Family of Pascual Duarte, has been viewed largely as a work continuing the tradition of the Spanish picaresque novel based on an autobiographical form of writing, crafted from the perspective of ‘tremendismo,’ a literary style aimed at taking realism to the extreme, dealing with human beings’ solitude, alienation and frustration in an existentialist vein, and depicting the sordid and dark aspects of human life with grotesque imagery. However, this novel’s significance lies not only in the novelty of its content but also in its formal reform, an aspect that has not received due attention. We intend to investigate the new outlook of the novel deriving from formal reform that entails techniques such as varied perspectives propelled by multiple narrators, memory-driven narrative, and multifaceted character description. In this light, Cela’s novel may be thought of as an endeavor to formulate different aesthetics for the genre by renovating narrative techniques, rather than to merely materialize aesthetics of realism in which the protagonist, condemned to death and on the brink of perishing, attempts to present a faithful account of his life by enlisting an autobiographical technique. In the final analysis, we can say Cela introduced a novel which ultimately allows the reader to reconstruct it by awakening her hardened sensibility through formal reform and transforming her into an active agent.