The Cemetery of Untold Stories

This final chapter acknowledges the complexity involved in The Importance of Being Seen, for the cemetery now thrums with a vibrant array of characters, including living people, dead people, and even people who never existed except in the realm of imagination. The cemetery, like the stories it harbors, thus becomes a place for community. The living beings who enter at night make the cemetery their home, congregating in groups based on their social status and focusing on the stories with which they have the greatest affinity. Because these stories have lived in Alma’s mind for years, the narrative implies that the sheer volume and content of these untold tales have had a profound effect upon her mental health. By keeping her silence, she became an anguished repository for voices that clamored to be heard. Now, set free from the prison of her mind, the myriads of unwritten characters are free to evolve, existing in the cemetery in this untethered form and facing their own dark secrets. Ultimately, they have developed a consciousness beyond the page. Thus, Alvarez uses the novel’s final chapter to create a metaphorical version of the phenomenon that many writers experience: the moment in which their characters take on lives of their own and dictate their own stories.

The final chapter also emphasizes the blending of fiction and reality as real people appear in the cemetery at night. For example, the pointed mention of a “little boy with green stains around his mouth” (236) who is accompanied by his mother implies that Perla’s victims, Oro and Vitalina, now haunt the cemetery alongside living people and fictional characters. Their presence is implied to be the result of Pepito’s decision to tell that story to Alma. Additionally, because Perla now works in the cemetery, her terrible deed echoes in her mind every day, breathing a strange new half-life into the two murder victims. Avatars of Alma’s writer-friend and the woman’s own unwritten characters also appear, and even though Alma did not directly create these characters, their stories have been lodged in her mind and are now free to take form in the cemetery of her creation. Against this haunting backdrop, Alvarez makes it a point to draw Bienvenida and Manuel’s own stories to a close, for Bienvenida is now fading away because her life story is soon to be published, likely thanks to Pepito. As Bienvenida’s essence strolls with Manuel, both characters take comfort in each other’s presence and must resign themselves to the necessity of accepting the fate that they lived out in real life.

Alvarez also uses this passage to imbue her own narrative with the philosophical dilemmas of the writing process itself, for Bienvenida has never sought recognition in story form and “wants to be left untold, the bliss of anonymity” (236). However, it is her privilege as a semi-famous person to have her story told, however distorted that story might become in the process. By contrast, Manuel feels that he died without telling his loved ones who he truly was, and he envies Bienvenida and longs “[t]o be relieved of the burden of the secret he carries with him” even as he “feels better already having shared it just with her and the groundskeeper” (236). However, although Manuel finds some form of release, Alvarez also acknowledges the mercurial, treacherous nature of narratives that distort the truth of the past, and the novel leaves readers with a series of rhetorical questions on this point, asking, “Who would want to go back to narrative form? Back into the living stream to be reborn in distortion in the minds of readers? Not a fate to be desired, shackled again, contained and restrained in chapter and verse” (236-37). Now, freed through the ritual creation of the cemetery of untold stories, these lingering souls and characters are free to roam, interact, and evolve as they choose.