Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Borges, Jorge Luis - Melvin S. Arrington, Jr. (essay date 1990)

Melvin S. Arrington, Jr. (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: “Narrative Authority in Fiction and Film: The Case of Borges's ‘El Muerto,’” in Romance Notes, Vol. XXXI, No. 2, Winter, 1990, pp. 133-39.

[In the following essay, Arrington describes the translation of Borges's “El Muerto” from short story to film.]

Originally published in Sur in November 1946 and later included in one of Borges's most important collections, El Aleph (1949), “El muerto”¹ tells the story of Benjamín Otálora, an impetuous young compadrito from Buenos Aires, who flees Argentina after killing a man in a knife fight. The protagonist crosses the Río de la Plata carrying with him a letter of introduction from his ward boss addressed to a Uruguayan strongman named Azevedo Bandeira. After learning that the man whose life he has just saved during a barroom brawl is none other than Azevedo Bandeira, Otálora tears up the letter,...

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