SOURCE: Lewis, Bart L. “Tales Told: Narrator, Character, and Theme in Juan Carlos Onetti's Juntacadáveres.” Chasqui 20, no. 1 (May 1991): 17-22.

In the following essay, Lewis explores the influence of Onetti's narrative strategy on his themes in Juntacadáveres.

The genius of Latin America's revered contemporary novelist and influential stylistic innovator, Juan Carlos Onetti, lies in his telling stories whose only reality is artistic and transcendent. In his first short stories and the landmark El pozo, first-person narration predominates: the storyteller is at the center of his tale, with the freedom to elaborate and imagine, to defer and efface. From the early works in the 1930s through El astillero in 1961, Onetti gives his narrators the freedom to create, but the sense of the prose is univocal, with metafictional scaffolding clearly visible and a controlling presence immanent. With Juntacadáveres in 1964, Onetti broadens the narrative base to establish three distinct...