SOURCE: "The Novels and Short Stories of Adolfo Bioy Casares," in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Vol. LII, No. 3, 1975, pp. 247-66.

In the following excerpt, Gallagher contends that "Bioy Casares's novels and short stories are comic masterpieces whose fundamental joke is the gap that separates what his characters know from what is going on."

On the one hand, there is a vast and inscrutable universe, manipulated by arcane and deliberate mystifiers; on the other hand a little man—a Venezuelan patriot [in La invención de Morel], a car mechanic [in El sueño de los héroes], a doddering porteño widower [in Diario de la guerra del cerdo]—who is painfully obliged to observe and suffer it. 'They' set the rules, 'they' know the answers. All that is left to our little man is frantically to guess, to deploy a hopeless but dogged 'furor conjetural' on the...