SOURCE: Maier, Linda S. “A Mirror Game: Diffraction of Identity in La vida breve.” Romance Quarterly 34, no. 2 (May 1987): 223-32.

In the following essay, Maier provides a Freudian interpretation of identity and sexuality in La vida breve.

A critical reading of Onetti's La vida breve (1950) reveals the very special value the creative process has in the narrative trajectory of both the novel and its protagonist, Juan María Brausen. Brausen, at the outset, is an employee in a publicity agency, but he is about, for reasons never disclosed to us, to lose his job. A friend, Stein, commissions Brausen to write a movie script, but as he begins to write, Brausen does not limit himself to a mere cinematographic script. Instead, he writes a fiction in which he creates a double, a provincial doctor named Díaz Grey. This displacement of life into art—within a fiction—entails a...