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Senseless, Horacio Castellanos Moya's Senselessness

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For many decades people have relied on their story telling to communicate their truths.Without the use of words many people’s struggle would be lost throughout history. Literature develops story-telling into a permanent mode of transportation. In his novel Senselessness, Horacio Castellanos Moya develops two simultaneous stories. Specifically, in his novel there is a narrator who has been hired to edit indigenous testimonies. While editing the testimony, the narrator details graphic details of systematic oppression and murder. While reading the testimony, the narrator is impacted by the gravity of what he is reading. The narrator of the story has not experienced the trauma he is reading about, and yet, his state of mind begins to deteriorate as he read their stories. With the narrator’s storyline, Moya’s novel Senselessness, vividly details the impact that words have on people. …show more content…

Moya brilliantly laces the novel with bits and pieces of the indigenous experiences as a form to express their story. By having the indigenous narrative told second hand through the narrator, the reader is able to make connections about the indigenous people’s story, because the narrator picks and chooses statements that make an impact on him. The first glimpse into the indigenous people’s mind is on the first page in the novel: “I am not complete in the mind” (1). The latter statement serves as an indicator for both the indigenous experience and as a foreshadowing for the narrators experience while editing the statements. Moya deliberately chooses this line as the first glimpse into the testimony because with this line he shows the great impact the testimonies will have on the narrator. In truth, as the novel develops, the narrator consistently references back to the the words he reads because they have a grave effect on

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