A Brief Life (Cyclopedia of Literary Characters)
At a glance:
- Author: Juan Carlos Onetti
- First Published: 1950
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Psychological
- Time of Work: The late 1940’s
- Setting: Buenos Aires and Santa María, Argentina
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction
- Subjects: Sex or sexuality, 1940’s, Prostitution or prostitutes, Alienation, Antiheroes, Imagination, Argentina or Argentineans
- Locales: Buenos Aires, Argentina
Characters Discussed
Juan María Brausen (BROW-sehn), the protagonist, who is suffering an existential crisis at a time when both his vacuous job as a Buenos Aires adman and his marriage are dissolving. Outwardly conventional, cautious, and repressed, he considers his life to be a form of death. Inwardly, though, he lives an artist’s fantasy life. To save himself from the outer void, he takes on two new identities: an impersonation that he assumes so as to enter the life of the prostitute who lives in the apartment adjacent to his own, and his fictional surrogate, the...
[The entire page is 1600 words long]
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