Point of View

The three novellas within Cowboy Graves, “Cowboy Graves, “French Comedy of Horrors”, and “Fatherland”, are written from a first person limited point of view. While the narrators each have different names, their narrative voices, experiences, and memories overlap. Bolaño blurs the distinctions between his narrators, Arturo Belano, Diodorus, and Rigoberto Belano, in order to bolster his thematic claim that identity is mutable. Events that Arturo alludes to in “Cowboy Graves” appear in the narrative present in “Fatherland”, while the Grub, who Arturo befriends in “Cowboy Graves” makes a cameo in Diodorus’ narrative, “French Comedy of Horrors”. The author enacts the varied yet consistent point of view to ask his reader to question their own relationship with identity and how they integrate past versions of self with their present self. If the author had written the novellas from the same point of view, or with...