Juan Carlos Onetti Short Fiction Analysis
Frequently compared to William Faulkner, both for his elaborate prose style and for his creation of a postage-stamp fictional world, Juan Carlos Onetti is often praised for his modern focus on alienated human beings and his postmodern experiments with self-reflexive metafictions. Many of his characters, facing old age and death, desire to find a way to retreat into the past or to escape to an ideal fictional creation to regain what is lost. As a result, his stories often focus on the power of the imagination and feature characters who are writers, actors, and dramatists. Ultimately, this emphasis compels Onetti to examine the nature of fictionality and playacting, which, finally, forces many of his stories into a realm somewhere between fantasy and reality, where the nature of reality itself is questioned.
“A Dream Come True”
The narrator of the title story of Onetti’s first collection is a theater producer asked by a woman to stage a play for her. The woman has in mind a single scene featuring herself, a man, and a girl who comes out of a shop to give the man a glass of beer. When pressed for a title, the woman says she will call it “A Dream Come True.” She is willing to pay to see the scene enacted once for her alone. Even though the producer thinks the woman is crazy, he has had a bad season and needs the money to escape to Buenos Aires; he thus contracts an actor he knows and makes the arrangements.
The woman has a mythical ageless quality about her; although she appears to be fifty, she has a girl’s air from another century “as if she had fallen asleep and only awakened now, her hair in disarray, hardly aged but seemingly at any moment about to reach her own age all of a sudden and then shatter in silence.” In the dramatized scene, she sits on a curb beside a green table next to which a man sits on a kitchen stool. When the man crosses the street to get a beer the girl has carried out, she fears he will be hit by a car. The woman lies on the sidewalk as if she were a child, and the man leans over and pats her on the head. The woman wants the scene enacted because she has dreamed it; during the dream she felt happy, and she wants to recapture that feeling.
During the enactment of the scene, while the woman lies on the stage being patted on the head by the actor, she dies, and the story ends with the producer concluding that he finally understands what it was all about, what the woman had been searching for. “I understood it all clearly, as if it were one of those things that one learns once and for all as a child, something that words can never explain.” Indeed, the woman’s desire is not as enigmatic as it may first appear, for by actualizing a dream, she fulfills a common human fantasy, after which she can happily die.
“Hell Most Feared”
The story focuses on a reporter who reports horse racing for a newspaper. After the reporter is separated from his actress-wife, he begins to receive intimate photographs of her with other men. The first two photographs create in him a feeling that is neither hate nor pain, a feeling that he cannot name, but which is “linked to injustice and fate, to the primal fears of the first man on earth, to nihilism and the beginning of faith.” He thinks that although he can understand...
(This entire section contains 1000 words.)
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and even accept his wife’s act of revenge, there is some “act of will, persistence, the organized frenzy with which the revenge was being carried out” that is beyond his comprehension.
When the estranged wife begins to send photographs to other people, even the man’s young daughter in a convent school, he begins to understand, but he is no longer interested in knowing what it is that he understands. The story ends with the man, blaming himself for mistakes in his relationship and in his life, killing himself. In sending the photographs, the wife seems to be searching for her husband’s weakness, until, finally, by sending a pornographic photo of herself to the husband’s daughter she has found the place where he is most vulnerable.
“Welcome, Bob”
In this early Onetti story, popular with anthologists, a middle-aged narrator gets a sadistic pleasure from observing the aging of Bob; it is his revenge for Bob’s preventing his marriage several years earlier to his sister Inez, because he was too old for her. At that time Bob told the narrator that he was a finished man, washed up, “like all men your age when they’re not extraordinary.” Bob tells the narrator that the most repulsive thing about old age, the very symbol of decomposition, is to think in terms of concepts formed by second-rate experiences. For the old, Bob says, there are no longer experiences at all, only habits and repetitions, “wilted names to go on tagging things with and half make them up.”
After the sister rejects the narrator and Bob grows older, the narrator begins a friendship with him so that he can more closely watch Bob’s aging process. He delights in thinking of the young Bob who thought he owned the future and the world as he watches the man now called Robert, with tobacco-stained fingers, working in a stinking office, married to a fleshy woman. “No one has ever loved a woman as passionately as I love his ruin,” says the narrator, delighting in the hopeless manner in which Bob has sunk into his filthy life. The story ends with the narrator’s final sad and ironic triumph: “I don’t know if I ever welcomed Inez in the past with such joy and love as I daily welcome Bob into the shadowy and stinking world of adults.”
