SOURCE: Terry, Arthur. “Onetti and the Meaning of Fiction: Notes on La Muerte y la Niña.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 15, no. 2 (April 1979): 150-68.

In the following essay, Terry examines the relationship between fact and fiction in La Muerte y la Niña.

Facts, Onetti has said, “son siempre vacíos, son recipientes que tomarán la forma del sentimiento que los llene”.¹ Another way of putting this would be to say that facts are relative—doubly so, if they are already part of a fiction—and that their links with the idea of a stable “reality” are more tenuous than might seem. Or one might go further and claim, as many recent novelists have done, that there is no clear and final division between the real and the fictive, and that any kind of language which appears to deny this is by definition false.²

At one...