SOURCE: "No Woman's Land: The Representation of Woman in Onetti," in MLN, Vol. 102, No. 2, March, 1987, pp. 358-77.

Millington is the author of Reading Onetti: Language, Narrative, and the Subject (1985). In the following excerpt, he examines the characterization and function of women in Onetti's fiction.

In Onetti we read a narrative of male subjectivity. It is a narrative founded on male characters' heterogeneity, incompleteness and difficulties. In a crucial sense, women characters barely exist—their containment within the categories of a male discourse is what constitutes them as well as what denies them. They have no independence of the male problematic, so that even the privileged, marginal women are to be understood as marginal to the male centre. The male value system maps the entire terrain of the narrative, his are the only coordinates. Hence women characters are given no intrinsic interest by the narrative.

But women are not...