SOURCE: Hayes, Aden W. “Onetti's El Pozo, Imagination, and Image.” Hispanofila 31, no. 1 (September 1987): 43-54.

In the following essay, Hayes discusses existentialist traits of El pozo as well as the visual mode of reality Onetti grants to his protagonist.

Juan Carlos Onetti's first novel, El pozo,¹ is the confession of Eladio Linacero, who divorces himself from quotidian reality and retreats to a world of fantasies which become the most important facet of his life. Linacero creates his alternative world much as a photographer creates a series of pictures—selecting his subjects, cutting them off from their contexts, emphasizing certain of their qualities and minimizing others, reshaping the images to conform to his vision of them. He names, catalogues and files these images in his memory so that he can recall and view them. It is this visual mode of apprehending both the world of “reality” around him and the...