SOURCE: Adams, M. Ian. “Juan Carlos Onetti: Alienation and the Fragmented Image.” In Three Authors of Alienation: Bombal, Onetti, Carpentier, pp. 37-80. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975.

In the following essay, Adams describes the reading of Onetti's fiction as a “schizophrenic experience” for the reader because of Onetti's technique of fragmenting perception and imagery.

Juan Carlos Onetti has been a prolific author and an important one.¹ His first publication, El pozo, in December of 1939, marked a new stage in Uruguayan literature. Angel Rama describes the cultural background of Onetti and El pozo: “From 1938 to 1940 a fracture occurs in Uruguayan culture that opens, through the course of a new interpretation of ethical and artistic values, a creative period that, after intense struggle, will control the intellectual life of the country. This fracture coincides with the rise of a generation of writers who vary between twenty and thirty years of...