UC Berkeley

This dissertation argues that Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 offers us a new way of thinking about the relationship between the individual and the multitude in the globalized world. I argue that the novel manages to capture the oppressive nature of its structures not by attempting to represent them directly but instead by telling the stories of individuals who feel especially alienated from them. These characters largely fail to connect with one another in any lasting way, but their brief encounters, some of which take place in person, others through reading, have pride of place in a text that, I propose, constitutes a brief on behalf of the marginal and the forgotten in its overall form: it is an example of the novel as an ever-expanding, multitudinous crowd; it strives to preserve the singularity of each of its members while at the same time suggesting that the differences between them are less important than their shared presence within a single narrative whole. I proceed by examining these characters in all their particularity and closely reading the novel’s key scenes, in which they meet one another, while also tracking how these characters and encounters are paradigmatic of different ways of relating. Chapter 1, “Insufferable Hierarchies,” focuses on 2666’s most bookish characters and their rage for “greatness,” exploring how literature in the novel both enlarges the moral imagination of certain characters and curdles that of others. My second chapter, “Women in the Shape of Monsters,” is centered on the novel’s least bookish stretch, the famous middle section about the murdered women of Santa Teresa. It examines how the fight waged by that section’s living women against gendered violence runs up against patriarchal power and the overwhelming burden of having to represent or avenge their murdered sisters. In “Everything in Anything,” my final chapter, I explore how the novel—itself a storehouse of miscellaneous but true information—allows its characters to form multi-generational and trans-historical bonds through the sharing of random facts and by unsystematic but assiduous reading in marginal spaces. In a brief coda, I argue that 2666’s ethics and poetics require both an openness to the possibility of change and a commitment to one’s particular way of being.