SOURCE: "The Shorter Works of Juan Carlos Onetti," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. VIII, No. 1, Winter, 1971, pp. 112-22.

In the following essay, Deredita discusses major motifs in Onetti's novellas and short stories.

For some twenty years after he published his first work, El pozo (The Well, 1939), Juan Carlos Onetti's reputation was confined to his native Uruguay and to Argentina. Born in 1909, he lived in Buenos Aires during most of the thirties, forties and early fifties, met the literary establishment there and published with major houses; but his books sold poorly, and he received scant critical attention. Except for a few critics and the coterie of Montevideo writers who felt his influence, the reading public seemed unprepared to follow his technical explorations or to recognize itself in the degraded world he was devising.

On Onetti's Literary Style:

''I don't know how to write badly,' Chao reports Onetti...