Brief & Preliminary Notes on 2666, by Roberto Bolaño

2666 is the magnum opus of the narrator (but not of a narrative); it is “a dream breaking away from another dream like one drop of water breaking away from a bigger drop of water that we call a wave” (“The Part About Fate”). Dreams play a part as important in this novel as the actions of any character: they tell not only the reader but also the characters what they’re feeling, who they are, and what should be done when the veil is lifted. It is as if dreams were more potent than human will.

We can be reasonably certain that Bolaño’s goal was to add to the “great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown” (“The Part About Amalfitano”). He may have accomplished this feat, only because he had no claim to perfection; there is no perfection in this book, neither in any of the several styles nor in the evasive narrative. In this way, Bolaño’s work is tremendously unlike that of his stated literary forebear, Jorge Luis Borges, who built tiny comprehensible watchmaker worlds with a Modernist’s precision of language.

Contemporary readers are accustomed to the unreliable narrator, which brings the integrity of the story into question; but they have not acclimated themselves to the suspension of narrative in the face of a narrator, as Bolaño has done. The narrator is unobtrusive, it is an imagination at work — only occasionally aware of itself. The only major work such as this is Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the closest sister of 2666 in every way but its wordplay. They are novels of the night, of the dream over the will, where the set-piece world is all an inscape.

2666 may be intended as the dream that springs from our world: as Joyce's work was Modernist Europe, this is the Contemporary Americas. Overwhelming the spectacle of our mundane decisions and individual desires is this dream, defying our most powerful desire for certainty. “‘The little old drunk is laughing because he thinks he’s free, but he’s really in prison,’ says Óscar Amalfitano, ‘that’s what makes it funny, but in fact the prison is drawn on the other side of the disk, which means one could also say that the little old drunk is laughing because we think he’s in prison, not realizing that the prison is on one side and the little old drunk is on the other, and that’s reality, no matter how much we spin the disk and it looks to us as if the little old drunk is behind bars. In fact, we could even guess what the little old drunk is laughing about: he’s laughing at our credulity, you might even say at our eyes’” (“The Part About Amalfitano”).

The serial killer is the one who made the disk, is the mind behind every mystery of the novel, is the narrator himself; but that is beside the point. Defiance is the will of reality, reflected in the dream of the world. Like Reiter, we are all troubled by the dilemma of the little old drunk, by “the possibility that it was all nothing but semblance” (“The Part About Archimboldi”). Perhaps only in our dreams lies the assurance that semblance has any substance beyond will. This is why the narrator interjects occasionally, asking questions, seeking reassurance, to make us accomplices in his murders. We are, as readers, “accomplices in imposture until the end” (“The Part About Archimboldi”) by assuring ourselves that this is not real, only a book — that it is all just a terrible dream.