The Obscene Bird of Night (Spanish: El obsceno pájaro de la noche, 1970) is the most acclaimed novel by the Chilean writer José Donoso.

The novel explores the cyclical nature of life and death and the connection between childhood and old age through shared fears and fantasies and a mutual lack of bodily control.

Donoso invokes the Imbunche myth to symbolize the process of reduction of the physical and intellectual self, turning the living being into a thing or object incapable of interacting with the outside world, and depriving it of its individuality and even of its name.

Even the identity of the characters becomes ambiguous or distorted sometimes, as for instance when Humberto says that Iris was developing a substantial clientele in the neighbourhood and then proceeds to say that he would hide inside the Ford car to watch her make love... to himself, as if it were an out-of-body experience.

In this way, Humberto provides the possibility of duplicity of narrative voices within the same character, and thus two subjective perspectives of the same reality: on the one hand, the narrative can be interpreted simply and realistically in terms of its context, in which Humberto Peñaloza, a middle-class law student and writer, is trying to make his way through the ranks of the contemporary Chilean society, which was strictly divided according to class; on the other hand, the narrative can be interpreted in terms of its ambiguous and amorphous nature, in which identity itself is not defined, history is the result of myth and the boundaries between the material and psychological world are broken and in flux, therefore opposing the solidity and immutability of the physical world and established society, where individuals are forced to lose part of their identity and freedom in order to acquire a role in society and thus not be otherwise marginalised.