Tai Wei Guo Jeremy Braddock ENGL 1270 The Interloper: A Story of Stories A hundred people can listen
to the same story and they will retell it a hundred different way. They may add in details that existed only in their imaginationthe color of a character's hair, sayor they may leave out details that did not adhere to their imagination. A theme, a symbol may strike a louder chord in some than others. Without meaning to, the retellers will infuse in their retelling a bit of their own story, a bit of their own soul. In The Interloper, Borges attempts to create the end product of such a story told and retold, gaining and losing a little with each teller like the game of telephone, or more poetically, a snowball rolling forever downhill. The writing of The Interloper oftentimes appears paradoxical. At one point, the narrator finds it pertinent to remind us that Juliana was a mere thing (not that Cristan thought she was a mere thing, but that she was a mere thing). Paragraphs later, however, the narrator has the tenderness to humanize her: she was expecting a long talk, so she lay down for her siesta (35). Here, she is not an object like a table that will only be used and wait to be used. Cristan's speech is similarly incongruous. For most of the story, he speaks normally, maybe even with a touch of the narrator's poetry: I'm going off to that bust over at Farias' place. There's Julianaif you want her, use her, Come on, we've got to take some skins over to the Nigger's place. I've already loaded them upwe can go in the cool of the evening (350, 351). As the brothers are about to bury her, though, Cristan suddenly speaks with slurred words and incomplete sentences like a stereotypical ruffian: I killed 'er today. We'll leave 'er here, her and her fancy clothes. She won't cause any more hurt (351). And what fancy clothes? Juliana, when she is sent to the whorehouse, fit all her belongings into a sackher most notable possessions seem to be the rosary of glass
beads and the little crucifix her mother had left her, not fancy clothes (350). The presence of these discrepancies can be explained by the existence of multiple narratorsthe successive line of storytellers for this storywho are seamlessly joined together by their unintentional editing of the story. The identity of the narrator at any given point is impossible to determineat most, we can only say that details such as Juliana's preference for the younger [Nilsen] (350) are fabricated because neither Eduardo nor any of the story's inheritors can know the mind of a dead woman. Like the handwritten names and dates (348) of the Nilsen family Bible, the authors of this story of the Nilsen brothers and their contributions are lost. In the same line that Borges uses to remind us of the narrator's presence, one of the narrators (Santiago, Eduardo, who knows?) reminds us that everything will one day be lost (348). In fact, the story of the Nilsen brothers was lost before the narrator of the prelude committed it to writingwhatever happens in this written account, we cannot know with certainty that it happened in reality or even in Eduardo's account. What, then, is the purpose of retelling this story? This story of the Nilsen brothers is no longer Eduardo's story. The Interloper is a story of many stories. The Interloper is the (brief and tragic) story of the sort of men that once fought their knife fights and lived their harsh lives in the tough neighborhoods on the outskirts of Buenos Aires (348). The Interloper is the story of two brothers whose love was completeplatonic and romantic, familial and unconditional. The Interloper is the story of two brothers whose names are Cain and Abel. The Interloper is the story of Juliana, the silent object. The Interloper is the story of Juliana, the girl used and abused and sold to a whorehouse, now murdered and buried. The Interloper is the story of storytellers intruding upon each others' stories.
