SOURCE: Sullivan, Mary Lee. “Projection as a Narrative Technique in Juan Carlos Onetti's Goodbyes.” Studies in Short Fiction 31, no. 3 (summer 1994): 441-47.

In the following essay, Sullivan attempts to define Onetti's narrative technique in Los adioses.

But that was when, without my understanding completely what was happening, I began knowing things and exactly what we had gotten ourselves into, though I could never say it, just as one knows what a person's soul is like but can't describe it in words.

(Onetti, “A Dream Come True” 59)

Few contemporary fiction writers have depended as heavily on the interpretive strategies of the reader as did Juan Carlos Onetti (1909-1994). Although his 1954 novella, Los adioses (Goodbyes), is one of his most demanding texts in this regard, it is also a hallmark of Onettian narrative in its controlled structuring of ambiguity. A close reading of the text reveals that it is, in fact...