SOURCE: Davies, Lloyd Hughes. “Uses of Irony in Juan Carlos Onetti's El astillero.” Iberoromania 17 (1983): 121-30.

In the following essay, Davies discusses Onetti's use of the modernist concern with absurdity in El astillero.

It is only during the last ten years that Juan Carlos Onetti has been generally recognized as a leading Latin American writer¹. Born in 1909, he has never enjoyed the widespread acclaim accorded to younger writers such as Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, though ironically, he is the acknowledged precursor of these so-called ‘boom’ novelists. Indeed, Vargas Llosa has himself asserted that the new Latin American novel, the ‘nueva novela’, was inaugurated in 1939, the year when Onetti's first novel, El pozo, was published².

Onetti's work has made an impact on two fronts. Firstly, in his native Uruguay it redirected the national literature, for years steeped in the traditions of regionalism...