SOURCE: Murray, Jack. “Plot and Space in Juan Carlos Onetti's ‘Tan Triste como Ella’.” Symposium 37, no. 1 (spring 1983): 68-83.

In the following essay, Murray explores Onetti's narrative devices in “Tan Triste como Ella.”

It has often been observed that Juan Carlos Onetti's unhappy lot is to represent trends before their time. He was writing fantastic stories before the fashion for the fantastic, New Novels before the New Novelists came along. While Onetti's penchant for setting yet-to-be vogues has doubtless created difficulties for him, for his admirers such a tendency denotes something positive and lasting: his broad and profound representativeness of what is typical and abiding in twentieth-century fiction. No one should be surprised that it could only be a South American, and specifically a platense, author who should possess this quality. In the cultural setting of Western literature, only writers from that part of the world seem able to...