SOURCE: Millington, Mark. “Para una tumba sin nombre (1959): Telling Stories.” In Reading Onetti: Language, Narrative, and the Subject, pp. 201-32. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Francis Cairns (Publications) Ltd., 1985.

In the following essay, Millington examines the metafictional elements of Para una tumba sin nombre.

In Para una tumba sin nombre Díaz Grey tells a story of people telling stories.¹ In theory, they are the same story, but they turn out to be different. The characters are, in fact, “telling stories”. Where in Los adioses the narrator/focalizer tells a story which seems not to fit the facts, the characters of Para una tumba all tell stories about the same events, but from different angles and such that they are, in whole or in part, mutually exclusive. The reader knows this. But the reader does not know who, if anyone, is telling a true story. Even Díaz Grey's story...