Narrating and “Voicing” the Animal: An Analysis of Focalization and Nonfocalized Animal Characters in Horacio Quiroga’s “Anaconda” (1921)

ABSTRACT: This article combines theories of narratology, fauna-criticism, and animal studies to analyze focalization and the nonfocalized animal characters in Horacio Quiroga’s “Anaconda.” While scholars have conducted ecocritical readings of “Anaconda” centered on the focalized serpent protagonists, the nonfocalized horses, dog, and mule receive little critical attention. Furthermore, these critics only superficially incorporate concepts of animal narration, voice, and agency, which provoke debate within animal studies today. I update this existing scholarship by examining Quiroga’s use of la voz animal as a narratological tool and by centering the nonfocalized characters of his story. Expanding on Scott Devries’s “fauna-critical” approach to Quiroga, I argue that analyzing the nonfocalized characters reveals Quiroga’s environmental critique to be more complex than originally conceived. Although “Anaconda ” indeed reckons with the role of modernization in perpetuating environmental destruction, it also demonstrates an acute awareness of the complicated paradigms of domestication and the harmful practices of animal testing.