The two narrative voices in “La agonía de Rasu-Ñiti”

The short-story “La agonía de Rasu-Ñiti” [The Agony of Rasu-Ñiti], by José María Arguedas —matured during eight years and written in two days according to a letter sent by the writer to the ethnohistorian John Murra—, shows, among its main features, a narrative voice with very special characteristics. In this paper, we pay attention to the resources with which Arguedas constructs this voice and, based on a proposal made by Zevallos Aguilar (2009), we conclude that we are indeed dealing with two narrators. From a narratological point of view, we find that both voices are distinguished by the narrative level in which they are located and by their relationship with the story, as well as by their knowledge, their temporal orientation and their ethno-cultural identification. In the end, we wonder about the meaning of this combination of options in the framework of Arguedas’s production.