Unsettling Spaces

Responsibility and Complicity in Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile

Authors

  • Sofía Forchieri Radboud University Nijmegen

Abstract

This essay explores artworks’ potential to foster a critical engagement with forms of involvement in political violence that often fall beyond the scope of the law. It does so by means of a reading of Roberto Bolaño’s short novel By Night in Chile (2004) and drawing on interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives on the relation between complicity, responsibility, the law, and the arts. The essay argues that By Night in Chile compels readers to acknowledge a form of responsibility that is not attached to legal culpability, but also, crucially, to reckon with their own reluctance to assume such an expanded form of responsibility.

Author Biography

  • Sofía Forchieri, Radboud University Nijmegen

    Sofía Forchieri is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Culture & History at Radboud University Nijmegen. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature and Romance Studies (Goethe University Frankfurt) and a research MA in Comparative Literary Studies (Utrecht University). Her research focuses on questions of complicity and implication in gender-based violence.

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Published

2026-04-18

Issue

Vol. 33 No. 2 (2020): War, Literature, and Law

Section

Article

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Forchieri, S. (2026). Unsettling Spaces: Responsibility and Complicity in Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile. FRAME, Journal of Literary Studies, 33(2), 95-105. https://platform.openjournals.nl/FRAME/article/view/27216