SOURCE: Lewis, Bart L. “Realizing the Textual Space: Metonymic Metafiction in Juan Carlos Onetti.” Hispanic Review 64, no. 4 (fall 1996): 491-506.

In the following essay, Lewis examines truth and reality in Onetti's metafictional narratives.

Throughout a closely-observed and honored writing career that began in 1933 (Onetti Goodbyes [Goodbyes and Stories] xvii), Uruguay's Juan Carlos Onetti (1909-1994) has hewed with unitary consistency to the belief that putting a tale down on paper is a troubled matter, loosening lives that are only virtual, possible deceits, scant sufferings, posed, languid beings. It is this attention to the making of the text itself that must surely lead the critic to see in Onetti not only the modernist reformer of the Latin American novel, but more significantly, the metafictionist theoretician who “explore[s] a theory of fiction through the practice of fiction” (Waugh 2).¹ Analysis of four exemplary works by Onetti along the trajectory of his stories...