By Night in Chile

Urrutia is the protagonist and unreliable narrator of By Night in Chile. A Jesuit priest, member of Opus Dei, and prominent literary critic, Urrutia is defined by hauteur and fear of oblivion. Longing to transcend a country and people he disparages as crude and unredeemable, Urrutia seeks salvation first through faith, then literature. However, these pursuits fail to save Urrutia from his culpability in Pinochet’s regime, and he dies without the consolation of life after death—either in heaven or literary immortality.

Bolaño modeled Urrutia on Father José Miguel Ibáñez Langlois, a Jesuit priest and literary critic who, under Pinochet, published regular book reviews in El Mercurio, a Santiago newspaper (Myerston, Jacobo, “The classicist in the cave: Bolaño’s theory of reading in By Night in Chile,” Classical Receptions Journal, Volume 0, Issue 0, 2016, p. 4). Bolaño establishes this connection through Urrutia and Langlois’s shared political views—both are conservatives who oppose liberation theology—their shared professions, their tutelage under an older literary critic, and their shared names: Ibáñez and Urrutia are Basque surnames and Langlois and Lacroix are French surnames (Ibid., p. 5). As professor Myerston notes, having a non-Castilian, European surname in Chile signifies upper-class status (Ibid., p.