By Night in Chile

Bolaño illustrates that, far from a pure, artistic pursuit, literature is as susceptible to moral bankruptcy as anything else. Writers, and by extension literature, can be fickle: Their allegiance sometimes isn’t fixed to a moral compass derived from their artistic sensibility. The central example of this fickleness is that of many Chilean authors under Pinochet, but Bolaño also draws a parallel between Pinochet’s Chile and Hitler’s Germany through the story of Salvador Reyes meeting Ernst Jünger in occupied Paris, using both historical examples to highlight the problem of complicity in dictatorships. 

Bolaño’s message is clear: Farewell, Urrutia, Canales, Reyes, and Jünger exalt literature and literary fame over life itself, becoming complicit in dictatorships. Reyes’s story is an embedded narrative that ironizes Urrutia’s later acceptance of Pinochet’s abuses. To Urrutia, Reyes’s story is a romantic tale of meeting a writer, Jünger, who has attained literary fame. However, outside of Urrutia’s romantic vision, Reyes’s story appears as an account of the banal callousness of two writers who do not care about the victims of World War II. The Guatemalan painter’s spartan, prison-like attic—in which Reyes and Jünger ignore the suffering painter to talk about art—is a microcosm of how some intellectuals accepted the privation of millions of people under Nazism.