El obsceno pájaro de la noche is a complex statement of the metaphysical problems faced by humanity in the twentieth century. Published in 1970 at a time when Chile's political system was turning to state socialism in search of solutions to age-old nagging social and economic injustices, a careful reading of Donoso's text reveals a deep concern for national problems and at the same time marks the author as a major practitioner of the "nueva narrativa" in contemporary Spanish American letters.

Donoso, whose Coronación (1958), Este domingo (1966), and El lugar sin límites (1967) announced his principal theme, the inner world of the collapsing Chilean oligarchy, achieves a masterpiece of major proportions with El obsceno pájaro…. It is clearly within the current of the innovative Spanish American novel of today in its cataloguing of the decline of bourgeois systems and values and in its creation of a new realism based on multiple mutations of the author's (and the reader's) creative imagination. There is a double axis on which Donoso's concept of reality is based; the novel moves simultaneously on an exterior and an interior plane, leading eventually to a negation of both levels of action. A new socio-economic system must replace the exterior reality of Chilean life just as the negation of the traditional protagonist points the way toward new novelistic forms. (pp. 107-08)

Action in the novel is fragmented so that the reader must constantly reconstruct the basic thread: a history in retrospect of the wealthy, landed Azcoitía family and especially of the family's charitable asylum for aging women, the Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales de la Encarnación de la Chimba. (p. 108)

If the principal purpose of the contemporary Spanish American novel is to chronicle the profound transformations which are causing a restructuring of a whole society, then this latest novel of Donoso fully measures up to the assignment. (pp. 108-09)

It is through Don Jerónimo's secretary, one Humberto Peñaloza, that the complicated relationship between exterior and interior reality in the novel comes into focus. Peñaloza is one form of a multiple protagonist whose constant metamorphoses create a series of unusual characters…. (p. 110)

Humberto Peñaloza, one of the principal forms of the central multiple protagonist, provides an entrée into the vertiginous inner world of Donoso's novel. The almost endless succession of metamorphic changes results in a variety of narrative points of view, all of which ultimately coalesce into a single undefined "yo." Paralleling these changes is a similar line of development in the multiple character of Inés Santillana de Azcoitía, who throughout her lifetime was so influenced by her mysterious, witch-like nurse, Peta Ponce, that she eventually assumed the personality of the person who ultimately destroyed her mind. (pp. 111-12)

Such a juxtaposition and multiplicity of characters results in a confused, schizophrenic world of inner reality. Inés suffers from advanced schizophrenia as the novel ends, and Boy [the grotesquely deformed offspring of Don Jerónimo and Inés] is clearly the deformed product of a chaotic society in the last stages of decay. In a sense La Rinconada, the artificial world in which Boy is to lead a Segismundolike existence, is a universe in miniature which should be viewed as a copy of Chilean society. Its staff of carefully chosen monsters duplicates the political and administrative bureaucracy which dominated Chile under the hand of the oligarchy. Donoso meticulously delineates the guidelines which governed the special world enclosed within the walls of La Rinconada…. (pp. 112-13)

Donoso's creation of La Rinconada with its false system of values and goals is a direct attack on a system of government which exploits the unfortunate masses as a foundation for its power. (p. 113)

The national consternation caused by the death of Don Jerónimo is reminiscent of the turmoil which followed the death of Mamá Grande in the celebrated short story by Gabriel García Márquez. His death also represents the end of an era in Chilean politics, and at the same time it heralds the termination of the power of the oligarchy. (pp. 113-14)

Following the death of Don Jerónimo, the announcement of plans to demolish the Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales marks the final negation of the legacy of a decadent aristocracy. Significantly, the occupants of the Casa are to be moved to bright, new quarters made possible by the bequest of one of the late residents in her final will. This monument to the Azcoitía family and to the memory of their ancestor for whom it was first constructed is doomed to die amid the rubble and dust of the Casa itself. Coupled with the symbolic destruction of the physical representation of external reality is a most surprising final scene which negates the multiple "yo," i.e., the narrator of the novel. Abandoned in the vacated Casa, the narrator is placed in a series of sacks, all of which are carefully sewn shut. (p. 114)

Donoso reduces the inner level of reality in the novel, the first person narrator, to the physical limitations of a bundle which a nameless old woman carries from the Casa into the brisk winter night. The final action develops under a bridge where a fire has been built to warm the bodies of a group of impoverished drifters. The old lady offers the contents of her sack to increase the fire: sticks, boxes, stockings, rags, newspapers, trash. Such is the ultimate form of Donoso's protagonist, and the destruction of inner reality is complete in the ashes of a sputtering fire.

In El obsceno pájaro de la noche Donoso reaches a new level of achievement within the framework of the "nueva narrativa." His use of fragmented and distorted protagonists parallels his destruction of temporal unity…. The negation of time is an aspect of the more general negation of reality which abounds in the novel. For Donoso the complete rejection of the traditional social and economic order points the way toward a "new" reality; it is suggested that the new home to which the inhabitants of the Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales are to move is symbolic of the new social and economic systems which must replace the decadent past. (p. 115)

As is so often the case with the contemporary Latin American novel, the work itself takes on life and rushes forward spontaneously to ends not originally envisioned by its creator…. Donoso in no instance seeks to present his protagonists as single psychological unities. His statement, "… soy una persona y soy treinta" [I am one person and I am thirty], clarifies the reasoning behind the multiplicity of characters in this work…. (p. 116)