SOURCE: Richards, Katharine C. “Playing God: The Narrator in Onetti's Los adioses.” Studies in Short Fiction 26, no. 2 (spring 1989): 163-71.

In the following essay, Richards attempts to distinguish between the role of the narrator as a witness-observer and his apparent desire for omnipotence in Los adioses.

The fiction of Juan Carlos Onetti, increasingly acclaimed as a major influence in the contemporary Latin American novel, makes significant departures from traditional narrative form. In the short novel Los adioses (1954), the narrator assumes an authoritative stance at odds with his condition as witness. Oracular, ambiguous, arbitrary, his judgments of persons and events exceed the knowledge that can reasonably be expected of an onlooker. Small wonder, then, that this pivotal character should impress observers as endowed with a god-like nature. One critic has likened him to “un dios todopoderoso que sujeta a sus criaturas a un destino caprichoso. …”¹ The narrator of Los adioses...