THE INVENTION OF MOREL

by Adolfo Bioy Casares

Synopsis: A fugitive (we never learn his name or his crime) is hiding out on a deserted island in the Pacific. Everyone avoids the island because of rumors of a terrible disease there that has killed entire ship crews in the past. The fugitive explores the island and discovers that someone was on the island before him and built a chapel and a large building he calls ‘the museum’ (more like a hotel), but these buildings are abandoned. Inside the museum, he finds a storeroom with food, a library, a record player and record collection. In the basement are motors generating electricity for the building, apparently powered by a water mill elsewhere on the island.
Then, the fugitive is forced to hide out in the woods because a group of ‘tourists’ arrives. Strange things are going on – the fugitive spies on the tourists for several days and watches as they seemingly appear in rooms out of thin air, but they apparently cannot see him. The fugitive falls in love with a woman among the group, Faustine, but of course, she cannot see him. A freighter arrives to take the ‘tourists’ back after a week. The night before they leave, the fugitive witnesses a confession to the group by their leader, Morel. Apparently, he has tricked everyone; he is an inventor who has developed a machine to record everyone on the island, but not just their image - his machine records all of their sensory experiences, their memories, etc. and can play back a realistic holographic projection that has a consciousness of its own. His purpose in doing this is to give all of his friends immortality through the recording. As long as the machines operate, their week on the island will be projected in an endless loop. Once the tourists leave, their recording starts playing again from the beginning.
The fugitive experiments with Morel’s machines, making a recording of his arm and playing this image back, but afterwards, his arm starts to decompose in reality. It is the same with anything else he records (plants, insects, frogs – they all rot, die). The fugitive discovers that Morel created the rumors of disease to protect the island, and even staged the wreckage of the freighter and his/his friends bodies to reinforce this rumor, as they all undoubtedly rotted and died after being recorded. The fugitive records himself for a week with the projection of the tourists, pretending he is Faustine’s lover, so that he will be projected for eternity with her.

How it relates to Lost: Appeared in S4 “Eggtown” episode. I believe this to be the single most important source of material for Lost that I have encountered so far. In addition to the similarities mentioned in the synopsis, the fugitive hears echoes of whispering and footsteps in the buildings (the whispering in the jungle on Lost), the leader of the tourists wears a fake beard for a while, the layout of the basement described by the fugitive is strikingly similar to the blast door map. As he tries to figure out what is going on, the fugitive explores a number of possibilities that have all been addressed on Lost as potential explanations;
• He is really dead, the tourists can’t see him because he is a ghost (ala The Turn of the Screw by Henry James which also appears on Lost and was adapted into the movie "The Others")
• He is really on a boat at sea and this is all a dying hallucination
• In reality, he is locked away in an insane asylum and this is his delusion
• P.52 “this island may be the purgatory or the heaven of those dead people”
In this book, the key theme is immortality, something frequently suggested on Lost. The fugitive spends his days writing a book about immortality – he wonders what does the body matter if we can make our consciousness immortal?