"The Invention of Morel" by Casares from page 53 to end

Alright I’ll be honest. My ideal ending had Faustine pulling off her fleshy mask of deception and revealing herself to be a cyborg. I was quite disappointed to instead find myself with a fair amount of answered and unanswered questions.

First off, since we never find out what had the narrator on the run from the cops I decided to make up a felony for him. Our dear fugitive was charged with the murder of a repairman who he was holding hostage until his washer was fixed, the poor guy died of a stroke (which was brought on by fright). Really though, I’m very curious as to what the true crime was and just as curious to know why the narrator found it unimportant to tell the reader about it.

Something I found interesting was how on page 56 the narrator hides behind a statue of a “dying phoenix”. This really stood out for me because Morel’s immortality leaves behind skinless, hairless carcasses. It has a kind of parallel to the myth that a phoenix is reborn from the ashes of its dead body.

As for Morel’s invention, it was very presumptuous of him to believe that people wouldn’t mind that he was using his machine on them. What of those who believe in afterlife? You can’t be reborn, go to heaven, or even ascend if your soul is stuck on repeat. Morel doesn’t even stop to wonder if maybe some of his friends don’t WANT to be immortal. If what he has done can even be called immortality. You wouldn’t even be able to interact or be aware of the passing time outside their own. He also assumes that the time they spend on the island is full of happy memories. Does it not occur to him that maybe some of them are unhappy there? All Morel really accomplishes is capturing a piece of what he and his friends were, a shard of their lives.

Here is one of my most irritating questions, what of the copy made of the narrator’s hand? Morel says that your soul is transferred to your copy… so wouldn’t the narrator’s soul of already begun to transfer to it? If he has two copies of himself then where does his soul go? I think he has created variables that could disrupt Morel’s machine or just destroy the attempts the narrator was trying to make to spend eternity with Faustine. Morel said that he can’t create life. That means that their souls come from their real bodies, it’s the original, not a back up. If the machine can’t create life then one of the narrator’s copies is shit out of luck in the soul department. Things aren’t looking good for him. Especially because, of the two, the soul will probably go to the copy recorded first.