NARRATIVE RECREATION THROUGH THE ANIMAL VOICE IN THE STORY OF A SEAGULL AND THE CAT WHO TAUGHT HER TO FLY, BY LUIS SEPÚLVEDA

Abstract

Most storytellers from before the 20th century made use of satirical animal narrators, the subject of whose satire – be it by means of fables, epics or early novels – was mankind. When an animal in such a story is mocking something, it is meant to indicate something that is wrong in the real world. The animal, ridiculing things in this manner, plays a social role through which it is possible to criticize society.  In this way, a contemptuous view of the animal remained; an animal that is considered inferior. And because it is considered as such, we would have the right to make endure anything at this animal. In this article, through fiction, we week to provide answers to ecological dilemmas by means of a 20th-century Latin American story, in which a conflict is resolved through the animal voice in an original way. In the story, a society based on ethical values is proposed and portrayed, a society where help and solidarity turn this animal utopia into a driving force in the battle against ecological disasters. Thanks to the Luis Sepúlveda’s writing, we will study the animal voice, basing our thought on a Gilles Deleuze’s quote.[1]

[1] “A writer is not a writer man is a politician, and he is a machine man and he is an experimental man (to be a man to become a monkey, or beetle, or dog or mouse, becoming-animal, becoming-inhuman, because the truth is the voice, is the sound, it's by a style that becomes animal, and surely sobriety force).”