Although García Márquez's body of work has inspired an enormous amount of critical recognition and praise, the stories of his early period have not received the amount of attention that his later novels have. As Raymond L. Williams points out in his discussion of the author in Twayne's World Author Series Online: "The stories from the 1947—1952 period are mostly unknown beyond the Hispanic world and relatively ignored by critics, even among Hispanists." "Eyes of a Blue Dog" is no exception to this rule; in fact, the Peruvian fiction and prose writer Mario Vargas Llosa notes in his 1971 book, García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio (García Márquez: The Story of a Deicide), that in style and structure the story is the weakest of the period.

In his 1990 biography, García Márquez...