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: The Man and His Work, Gene H. Bell-Villada suggests that in 1950 García Márquez was writing under the ‘‘lopsided spell’’ of Czech writer Franz Kafka’s short stories, arguing that ‘‘Eyes of a Blue Dog’’ is a ‘‘strangely dark’’ story ‘‘depicting individuals trapped within their . . . heads.’’ Later in his biographical study, however, Bell-Villada cites ‘‘Eyes of a Blue Dog’’ as one of the ‘‘sweeter and more touching’’ stories of a group that he finds ‘‘brooding and morose,’’ and he characterizes the narrator’s relationship with the woman as a ‘‘passionate amour.’’ Raymond L. Williams also comments briefly on the outside influences of ‘‘Eyes of a Blue Dog,’’ arguing that its central relationship ‘‘portrays a situation reflecting French existentialist literature: its point of departure is two persons isolated in a room.’’