And of Clay Are We Created

The narrator, though unnamed in this short story, is Eva Luna. Eva, the titular character of Allende’s novel Eva Luna, is an orphaned storyteller who ascends from humble beginnings to a position of literary and revolutionary import in her native country. She strikes up a romantic relationship with Rolf Carlé, and in this story, she is with him when he is called in to cover the story of the mudslide. Eva proves herself singularly in-tune with Rolf’s emotional landscape, noting that the camera lens he uses to report on his assigned stories “transport[s] him to a different time from which he could watch events without actually participating in them” (Paragraph 5). Eva inhabits the role of storyteller for the duration of the narrative, as she is quite removed from the actual site of the tragedy and relays her own interpretive account of what she sees. Her distance also allows her to act as a surrogate for the expansive, anonymous audience that watches Azucena’s plight from around the world. Eva functions as a representative spectator who is, in the end, just as unable to change Azucena’s fate as the majority of the fictive onlookers who follow her story.