The Rest is Fiction: Vargas Llosa Imagines the Experience of Dying

ABSTRACT: On several occasions Vargas Llosa returns to a particular aspect of the theme of death in literature, exploring ways to represent the internal experience of dying. His fascination with rendering the perspective of a dying protagonist culminates in the 2021 autofictional story 'Los vientos', in which a narrator-protagonist with autobiographical characteristics describes suffering a fatal heart attack in a first-person narration. This article traces the development and narrative realization of the theme of dying in Vargas Llosa's fiction, exploring the variety of narrative strategies he uses to evoke the unknowable experience on the threshold of death, and to what effect.