Open-Ended Existences in the Narratives of Roberto Bolaño’s the Savage Detectives and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

This thesis engages with Latin American writer Roberto Bolaño and his novel, The Savage Detectives (1998), and African-American writer Ralph Ellison and his novel, Invisible Man (1952). This study will examine the ways in which the narratives contained therein work to avoid hardened life trajectories and a fixed-identity formation in favor of a more fluid becoming of self. Despite the fact that these two novels emerged out of different national, historical, and political contexts, they both respond to similar social and literary mechanisms. These mechanisms come in the form of expectations that are held by not only U.S. book publishers, critics, and literary intelligentsia, but also by the U.S. readership as a whole and these expectations collectively shape the ways in which literary works written by authors who may be read as “other” are interpreted. Thus, this thesis has two aims. First, to explore how the narratives in The Savage Detectives and Invisible Man as well as Bolaño and Ellison as authors resist and exceed these ethnic and national expectations. The second aim, in alignment with the first aim, is to tease out the rich ontological configurations portrayed in both The Savage Detectives and Invisible Man. Both of these novels consciously depict life as a process of “ceaseless becoming” – a process that oscillates between forms and aims. In an attempt to provide a theoretical framework through which one may see life portrayed as such, I will invoke Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophical concepts of the “rhizome” and “line of flight” as well as Elizabeth Grosz’s reading of Darwin’s conceptualization of life.