José Donoso and the Art of Ambiguity

Abstract The Obscene Bird of Night (1970), José Donoso’s masterpiece, has been regarded as an extremely complex text, implying numerous narrative lines, an exquisitely orchestrated polyphony and a choral characteristic questioning the human being’s ability to finally reach the ultimate truths of existence. Nevertheless, the author also aspired to offer the reader, even if at times obliquely and symbolically, an expressive picture of the Chilean society as a whole, characterized by a specific hypocrisy, in spite of the so called “obsession of sincerity” that was meant to express the essence of this country in the general context of 20th century Latin American reality. Thus the novelist set up a hallucinatory human and physical landscape where the illusion is the only one certainty and where the monster and the horror are turned into the representative images of a completely distorted world.