The Invention of Morel

Content Warning: The source material for this study guide contains references to suicidal ideation and uses an outdated, offensive term to refer to Roma people. This language has been preserved only in quotation.

The man who tells this story through his diary does not give much away about himself, not even his name. He understands that someone may read his diary one day, so at points, the entries read more like a letter, and he reveals aspects of his background. His awareness of the changing purpose of his diary shows when he writes, “I have the uncomfortable sensation that this paper is changing into a will” (12). Later, he writes that his diary is a way to keep the machines, and thus the images, safe by detailing what he knows of them.

A key aspect of his narration is his unreliability. The people and events are all filtered through his perspective, prejudices, and motivations. For example, his descriptors for Morel are largely negative, evidence that he views him as his rival for Faustine’s affections. Combined with being sick and hallucinating even before the people arrive, the reader cannot fully trust the narrator to tell the unvarnished truth, despite his self-perception as an objective and rational person.

Though he refers to an “unexciting childhood” in Caracas and never specifies what his crime was, he conveys that it was serious enough to force him into exile. His escape route, pieced together through different diary entries, is bizarre—he fled to neighboring Colombia, then to Calcutta (Kolkata), India, and finally to Rabaul, Papua New Guinea, crisscrossing the globe before ending up on the island. Later, he recalls working at a literary magazine but also as a governmental official; he is in the capitol with “the imperious Valentín Gómez” who reads the Venezuelan Declaration of Independence aloud (103). This is likely a reference to Juan Vincente Gómez, who became dictator around the time that oil reserves were discovered. However, it’s unclear what actions the narrator took to earn the dictator’s ire.

More of the narrator’s character is revealed when the others arrive. His paranoia about being captured makes the visitors “odious intruders” and “my unconscious enemies” (11). He is curious about their arrival and behavior but finds “allusions or threats in everything” (64) and dreads “an invasion of ghosts or, less likely, an invasion of the police” (18). It takes him a while to process the strange events because his rational mind can’t accept them. Sometimes he explains it away; in other moments, he waxes more dramatic, playing with the idea that either he or the visitors are dead. The thought amuses him: “Now I understand why novelists write about ghosts that weep and wail. The dead remain in the midst of the living […] So I was dead! The thought delighted me. (I felt proud, I felt as if I were a character in a novel!)” (53). Throughout the text, the narrator centers himself in the events happening around him, and his musings here reveal his self-importance. Likewise, his courtship of Faustine is one-sided, maintained exclusively by his fantasies without regard for her desires.

While the narrator casts Morel as his rival and the two men do differ—Morel is a scientist, while the narrator seems to be more of a philosophical or literary person, writing a research project about immortality that is pure speculation—these self-centered qualities make them analogous. The narrator admires Morel’s grand project to make Faustine his forever, calling it “sublime.” With very little left for him in life, he decides to follow in Morel’s footsteps and accept the risk of Morel’s invention, casting himself as a romantic lead to be replayed forever.