Set amidst the diaspora of Chilean exiles in Latin America and Europe, the fourteen stories in Last Evenings on Earth are populated by Bolaño’s beloved «failed generation» and demonstrate the complexities of Latin American identity and history. The narrators are usually writers facing private (and often unfortunate) quests, speaking in the first person as if giving a statement, as witnesses to a crime. These protagonists tend to take detours and narrate unresolved struggles. They are characters who live on the margins. Other stories are narrated in the third person by the author «B.», which is one of the many cases in which Bolaño writes himself into his own fiction.