“We are many”

This chapter looks at Neruda’s memoirs as an attempt to find a whole in different parts of his self. He embraces his own contradictions, without falling into self-aggrandizement. Instead, the chapter argues, he presents a complex self, at times heroic, other times not at all. In Confieso que he vivido ( I Confess I Have Lived ), he admits that, as a human being, he is many Pablo Nerudas, and some of these have faults. He felt the need to clarify and correct the way in which the world saw him in human terms. In part, this reveals, of course, the profundity of his debt to the American poet Walt Whitman, who asked his readers to accept him with all his “contradictions.”