SOURCE: Vasquez, Mary S. “Ramón Sender and Wartime Defenses: Contraataque as Fictive Autobiography.” In Critical Essays on the Literatures of Spain and Spanish America, pp. 225-33. Boulder, Colo.: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 1991.

In the following essay, Vasquez separates the real from the fictional aspects of Contraataque, finding it less a piece of propaganda than a careful attempt at self-justification on the part of the author.

Ramón Sender's 1938 Contraataque must be the most quickly dismissed, misread, and, I feel certain, unread, of all his non-essay works. And, in fact, those critics who through the decades set Contraataque aside after a phrase or a sentence, deeming it unworthy of any genuine scrutiny, consistently classified it within the essay genre, albeit as a perhaps more dashing sub-species, the propagandistic war chronicle and panegyric. I have argued elsewhere for a view of Contraataque as a novel.¹ The focus...