The Question of Autobiography. Bless Me, Ultima can be categorized as a "quasi-autobiographical" novel in the sense that a mature, older "I" serves as narrator for the experiences of the younger "I." A mature Antonio is narrating his experiences as a young boy, but the experiences are conveyed through the childlike naiveté of a six- to eight-year-old boy.
At another level, like many other novelists, Anaya himself admits that he used his personal experiences and those of others in his childhood to construct the story. In another sense, then, the novel is quasi-biographical, but the reader is never privy to the distinction between the real and the fictional because Anaya presents it all as fictional. It really does not matter much which is real and which is non-real since what is worthy of note is that Anaya, like other writers, takes his own life as a rich repository of experiences from which he draws upon to construct his stories.
