Essay Questions

Alicia Partnoy has stated that there is a certain amount of fiction added to her autobiographical novel. Do you think this matters? Does the addition of fiction negate the power of the book?

There is a certain amount of fiction added to the book because some of Partnoy's knowledge of her experiences is incomplete, through no fault of her own, and so filling in the blanks with her imagination was necessary in the writing of the novel. For example, by listening she was able to discover that other prisoners were being tortured, or mocked, and generally dehumanized, and so she understood the truth of what was happening; the evil that was being done to her was being duplicated thousands of times over. The fictionalization was not of the horrors done, but the details of the people it was being done too. Because the prisoners were blindfolded, Partnoy could not tell what her fellow prisoners actually looked like, other than by peaking through a tiny gap in her blindfold. Therefore, she had to construct this from her imagination and fictionalize the actual prisoners whom she did not know. Similarly, the prisoners were forbidden to speak to each other and so it was not possible to find out anything about them, including their names, and so this, too, would need to be recreated in a fictional way in her mind when it came to writing the book. This fictionalization in no way detracts from the validity of the novel as it is written because the majority of it is Partnoy's own truth told from her own experience. If she had not fictionalized other prisoners and events in their lives where she needed to fill in blanks then the novel would have read more like a register of the missing or a brutal list of horrors perpetrated, rather than a human story. This does not alter the facts or lessen their power in this novel.

"I, Alicia Partnoy, am still alive." What is the meaning behind this statement?

There are two meanings to this statement. The first is that amidst all of the torture and murder she has succeeded in still being alive and not succumbing to the brutality, which means that there is still a sliver of hope for her to cling to that she might one day get back into the real world again. This is a small positive for her to focus on and hang onto even though it seems unlikely given her situation.

The second meaning is more metaphorical; she is still alive in that she still has a sense of self, despite the dehumanizing techniques used by her captors. She is still Alicia, she is not "prisoner number", and with this she is resisting them even though they are unaware of it as she is refusing to be broken. This also allows her to hold on to other small things that remind her of and link her to her former life; rain on her face, which means that she can still feel and enjoy sensations like she used to, and allows her a link with the outside world too as there are people outside of the prison who are free and upon whose faces it is also raining. These small things contribute to her maintaining her humanity which is why she announces that SHE is still alive, rather than being a number, she is still a person with a name and the character she always had.

Why was it important for Partnoy to write this book?

There are certain periods in history that are so heinous that they need to be talked about forever, but unfortunately there are also very few witnesses to mass murder. For example, the only reason the Holocaust was discovered and told of to the world is that the camps were liberated by the allied forces who told of what they had witnessed, and they liberated the camps whilst there were still enough survivors to speak their own truths. The situation in Argentina is different because there are so few survivors of the experience. The prisoners were called the "disappeared" because they were arrested and never seen again, having been murdered by their captors. There is a saying that "a dead man tells no tales" and this is the case in situations of government-ordered murder like this. That means that with so few survivors it is even more important for those who did survive, like Partnoy, to bring the attention of the world to what happened. She has also used the novel as a catalyst for finding out the identities of as many of the prisoners as possible so that she can reunite them with their families either in real life, or in a metaphorical capacity by telling their families what happened to them. She has also been able to identify some of the captors and this is important in bringing them to justice. The more unknown an event like this is to the rest of the world, the more important it is for the people who actually experienced it to write about.