The Piazza Tales Literature and Writing Quotes

The dead letter office is for letters that are undeliverable. The narrator conflates that with actual dead people. This blurs the line between writing and reality—a line which gets smudgy in other places in the collection as well. Bartleby is character and writer; you could see him as writing himself, a self-penned letter that never gets delivered.

Don Benito is the inventor of the tale here—and he is in fact telling his story for evil purposes. The actual author of that story, though, is not Don Benito, but Babo. Don Benito is not only telling the story; he's a character in it.

There are lots of quotations from Spenser's The Fairie Queene in "The Encantadas." They emphasize the fact that the Galapagos are strange, distant, and separate from every day experience, just like fairyland. At the same time, though, Spenser's rich fairy world is meant to contrast with the bleak, distant, blighted Galapagos.