The voice of Help in Roberto Bolaño's Amulet

Abstract

In this paper I analyze the narrative voice of Amuleto, a novel by Roberto Bolaño published in 1999. Auxilio Lacouture is the autodiegetic narrator and her voice presents two salient features: the first one is the repetitive use of the first person pronoun, “yo” (I), and the second is the presence of two different dialects in one single voice. We find that except in the last part of the novel, where the Tlatelolco massacre is described, there is a repetition and insistence of the first person pronoun and a combination or mixture of the Mexican and Argentinean dialect. We believe that from these features we can trace in the narrative voice three topics: trauma, hybrid linguistic identity, and memory—a memory that brings things back not in a chronological way, but ambiguously and confusingly, showing that the important thing is fighting to not forget, and to keep telling stories. Auxilio’s voice is a voice of “auxilio” (help) even when there is nobody to listen to it, and it is, at the end, what we have to defend ourselves, an amulet; it is literature.