The short story I read is The Girls Resembled Each Other in the Unfathomable by Carlos Labbé. This story is found in Granta 113: The Best Young Spanish Novelists. It’s a great story to graph because it revolves around an interesting web of relationships that center around the disappearance of two siblings and one mysterious narrator. In the story we learn that, though the siblings, Bruno and Alicia Vivar, were never again seen together, over the years, there are sightings of each of them separately.
I took the names of all the main characters of the story and created an excel sheet with two columns. In one column I wrote the name of a character. In the second column, I wrote the name of a character he or she was in a scene with. I did this for all of the nine characters. What the graph shows us is who knows whom for sure because they were seen interacting at some point in the story.
It was surprising to see how many people, Jose Francisco Vivar, the missing siblings’ father, is connected to. His role doesn’t seem as pivotal in the text. It’s as if the writer is deliberately trying to hide Jose Francisco’s importance by only alluding to his complicity in the disappearance of his children. But, the graph clearly shows us that Jose Francisco knows a lot more than we are led to believe in the narrative, simply because of the people this character is connected to.
With a little more experience and by asking the right questions of my data, I think it may be possible to figure out who the mystery narrator is. The clues seem to be tangled up in the web of relationships, but some further network analysis is needed. I reached out to my classmate, Jonathan Calzada, to see if he might be interested in taking the work I’ve done and asking some further questions of the data to see if he could extrapolate more information that might point us towards who the mystery narrator is or who is responsible for the missing Vivar siblings. I look forward to seeing what he finds.
What the graph cannot answer is why the siblings were never again seen together nor can it clarify if Bruno Real, Bruno Real Yañez, and Francisco Virditti are, in fact, the same person.