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Amid its myriad insights to abstract truths-the vulnerability of literature to power, for example, or the psychology of complicity with violence-it is abundantly clear that Roberto Bolaño's Nocturno de Chile (2000) is a historically situated novel, embedded in the particularities of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile from 1973 to 1990. The novel is the deathbed narration of Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean Opus Dei priest turned literary critic who becomes increasingly implicated in networks of authoritarian power and abuse. Urrutia, for his part, stubbornly insists on his moral faultlessness even as he recalls the ways he benefited from-and ultimately participated in-the Pinochet regime and its human rights violations. This semi-confessional narrative begins, uncharacteristically for the genre, with a proclamation of moral purity that the remainder of the novel attempts to substantiate: the priest proclaims that it is recent "infamias" spread by an unnamed joven envejecido that have prompted him to chronicle "aquellos actos que me justifican" (11). This allegedly guilty joven envejecido remains a spectral presence and the narrative motor for the majority of the novel, which constitutes Urrutia's attempt to both disprove and erase his accuser.
The novel's ending, however, has quite a different outcome: the climax stages a final, terrifying, and decidedly undesired encounter between the two. After all of Urrutia's self-justification and reflection on the dictatorship, he returns to consider el joven envejecido and is confronted with "la verdad...como un cadáver" (149). Though critical consensus has established el joven as Urrutia's alter-ego or guilty conscience, I read him as an independent historical subject: a tortured victim of the Pinochet dictatorship, whose full identity becomes clear when he emerges as cadaver at the novel's conclusion. This reading opens up a new understanding of the final scene as one of ethical recognition, in which Urrutia sees himself in the previously spectral other, a victim he vehemently sought to occlude. This encounter is far from peaceful: upon acknowledging this other, Urrutia is overcome by a whirling host of faces from his past, and the narrative ultimately concludes in an apocalyptic, novel-ending "tormenta de mierda" (150). With this paradoxical confessional buildup and its unexpected, repulsive finale, the novel dramatically reconfigures two concepts from Catholic orthodoxy: eschatology (the end of times) and sacramental confession, also known as...