The Narrator In The Invention Of Morel

How do we know the things we are seeing or experiencing is actually real and not a figment of our imagination? This is a very important question, especially, when we are taking something that can affect or distort our reality. Drugs and alcohol are something that can distort our reality and have us struggle with trying to separate what is real and what is a figment of our imagination. In the novella The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, the narrator is struggling to tell what is real and what is not, thus making him an unreliable character. Many elements of fiction makes this person a unreliable character, from the POV of the narrator, the setting of the island, and the characterization of the narrator, all within in the plot of the

The island was left abandoned by some people, the merchant said, “men built a museum, a chapel, and a swimming pool on the island. The work was completed, and then abandoned,” (Casares 10). People were working at this island, it was going to be a place for people to stay or even visit but whatever the island held, it made the people run away and abandon it. They left all the hard work they put on to become a home. The merchant even says that even the Chinese pirates and the white ship of the Rockefeller Institute never goes to the island, they try to stay away from it. So, if the most smartest and the most criminal people try to stay away from it and not use it for their own benefit, there must be something wrong with the island. The merchant also states that the island “is known to be the focal point of a mysterious disease, a fatal disease that attacks the outside of the body and then works inward. The nails drop off the fingers and toes, the hair falls out,” (Casares 10). This shows signs of some type of radiation going on with the island. This can easily be a cancer growing in the body. Cancer is division of abnormal cells that spread throughout the body, it brings death and destruction. In Peter Jacob and Daniel O. Stram article, Late Health Effects of Radiation Exposure, it states “on radiation exposure in relation to risk of breast, thyroid cancer, and leukemia, cardiopulmonary events, and other late effects,” (Jacob and Stram