CONNECTING THE DOTS: Evil as an intertextual communicator in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

Abstract: Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous book 2666 is often considered his masterpiece. As it was a race against his own death, Bolaño won it while leaving a dominant statement behind, a supreme landmark of our new post-national world, where everything seems entwined (Lethem, 2008). In this five-part narrative, intertextuality plays a crucial role. The common link between all these stories is a series of murders in a Mexican city. The narrative of 2666 happens in around ten countries, and their characters are from a dozen more, with every story being somewhat tangled into a reality where violence is abundant. The references to the natural essence of evil set the atmosphere. In 2666, we have the opportunity to explore the condition of evil in a globalized world (Macaya, 2009). The aim of this dissertation is to better understand how the underlying ideologies of globalization and capitalism unify the different parts of the novel, establishing a dialogue between them, while creating a comment on our over connected postcolonial world.