There is an especial similarity between El túnel and Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground. The deranged murderer of Sábato's novel, Castel, clearly seems to be a twentieth-century version of Dostoevsky's underground man. Castel's role can be more fully understood in the light of the Dostoevskian protagonist. Although living almost a century apart, both characters suffer from hyperconsciousness, loss of identity, and extreme inability to communicate with other human beings. Their reactions to the situations in which they find themselves are surprisingly similar. They are constantly immersed in extraordinarily detailed rationalizations, but their logic leads them nowhere; they become rebels against society and even themselves, and in the end they bring harm to the only person with whom they could have established a successful human relationship. In the two novels the suffering of both protagonists finds its literary expression in a central metaphor of existential isolation, the...