By night in Chile

Bolano Robert artistically gives a narrative account of the regime brutalities and excesses that was meted out to the Chilean people during General Augusto Pinochet’s reign, through his book entitled By Night in Chile. It is a thriller that takes the reader through a journey into the internal structures that construed the ugly stench of an unpopular regime that relied on the services of common and elitist goons to crush any resemblance of opposition. The writer does not mince words in poignantly exposing the level of melancholy instigated by the prevalent culture of intolerance and brutality.
To avoid leading his readers into a hasty fallacy of false conclusion, he gives readers a formal orientation into the complexities of the Chilean sticky political terrain predating the putsch that eventually saw the assassination of President Allende Salvador. Reading through the book, the writer does not state in clear terms if the regime excesses was an inevitable process or not. On the contrary what is abundantly evident is that he allows his readers to connect the pieces in this brain teasing novel.
Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a conservative Roman Catholic priest is portrayed as the contemporary villain in the discourse. His actions and inactions generated in different interphases throughout the novel is the premise upon which the theme of this essay is built; a strife to distant himself from a clear guilt by association reinforced by an attitude of indifference to the existent realities of his times. We read of Father Sebastian, a character who does not only represent himself but also a complex network of formidable social institutions among them included the Christian fraternity and the elitist writers’ institute of Chile (Proyect 2004). A once upon a time boisterous Father Sebastian Urruta is now struggling to disentangle himself from the grips of a pricking conscience that is justifiably scared of posterity. Ironically, Father Urruta, notwithstanding the emotional torment is still seeking to establish a reconciliatory point between his known posture of being in bed with the Pinochet regime as a symbol of his socio-political sterility (Ben 2005).
Incidentally this stance ushers in the discourse in an unhampered fashion. Employing the style of recollective narration the villain tells his story on the one hand as a man who has nothing to hide because of a purported clean record, meanwhile unknown to him; this approach makes it easy to infer that though a priest by vocation, his priorities lay elsewhere. It may be too premature to quarrel him at this early stage, judging from the fact that his aspiration to seek admission into the prestigious Chilean elite writers’ brigade may be well intentioned.

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