SOURCE: Bacarisse, Pamela. “El obsceno pájaro de la noche: The Novelist as Victim.” The Modern Language Review 81, no. 1 (January 1986): 82-96.

In the following essay, Bacarisse examines Donoso's narrative devices to discover the relation of the narrator to the author, as well as the dominant emotional state in El obsceno pájaro de la noche.

… es como si él mismo se hubiera perdido para siempre en el laberinto que iba inventando lleno de oscuridad y terrores con más consistencia que él mismo. …¹

One of the fundamental problems when reading José Donoso's El obsceno pájaro de la noche is that of sorting out what the author himself has referred to as the ‘múltiples versiones’ (p. 356) of what we are told and, even more important for the purpose of this essay, of discovering who is narrating them. Nothing can be sure. The ‘voice’ of the apparent narrator...