SOURCE: "Strategies for Reader Participation in the Works of Cortázar, Cabrera Infante and Vargas Llosa," in Latin American Literary Review, Vol. XIII, No. 26, July-December, 1985, pp. 25-28.]

In the following excerpt, taken from an essay comparing Cabrera Infante's works with those of two other well-known Latin American authors, Hazera investigates Cabrera Infante's use of "fragmentary structures".

Like Cortázar, Cabrera Infante resorts to a fragmentary structure to provoke reader participation. While Hopscotch is a collage of written texts, Three Trapped Tigers is a collage of spoken texts. Unlike Cortázar, who orients the reader in the arrangement of the parts by providing a table of instructions, Cabrera Infante guides the reader by maintaining the same title, the same narrative point of view, and the same mode of speech in all sections of the novel dealing with a given subject. For instance, all sections entitled "I Heard Her Sing...