SOURCE: Richards, Katharine C. “Playing God: The Narrator in Onetti's Los adioses.” Studies in Short Fiction 26, no. 2 (spring 1989): 163-71.

[In the following essay, Richards attempts to distinguish between the role of the narrator as a witness-observer and his apparent desire for omnipotence in Los adioses.]

The fiction of Juan Carlos Onetti, increasingly acclaimed as a major influence in the contemporary Latin American novel, makes significant departures from traditional narrative form. In the short novel Los adioses (1954), the narrator assumes an authoritative stance at odds with his condition as witness. Oracular, ambiguous, arbitrary, his judgments of persons and events exceed the knowledge that can reasonably be expected of an onlooker. Small wonder, then, that this pivotal character should impress observers as endowed with a god-like nature. One critic has likened him to “un dios todopoderoso que sujeta a sus criaturas a un destino caprichoso. …”¹ The narrator of Los adioses displays an urge to power, a will to control and manipulate, which further sets him apart from the witness-observer role he ostensibly affects. As readers, we find ourselves confronted by an equivocal being whose claims to special knowledge conflict with our experience of reality and of literary convention. To assess his true nature properly, we must trace the uneasy, shifting balance between his purported powers and the limitations inherent in his circumstances.

His description of his initial encounter with “the man,” who is the protagonist of Los adioses, sets a pattern he will follow throughout the work. He picks and chooses what he will tell the reader according to the highly personal criteria of his own interests. Details enumerated in series obscure rather than clarify—creating what a distinguished Uruguayan critic has aptly termed “una visión de lupa que al lector le mostraba el poro, aunque le hurtaba el rostro.”² Not only does he omit the kinds of salient features normally included in descriptions, but the recital of his first impressions combines physical traits with conclusions about attitudes and character. The aspect he chooses to emphasize in the memorable opening passage is the Man's hands, whose clumsy movements he interprets as revealing both an apology and a lack of faith, conclusions stated not as interpretation but as fact.³

The “facts,” in terms of the circumstances and events encompassed by this work of fiction, are few. The Man, suffering from an unnamed illness, comes to an unidentified mountain town for reasons of health, as had the Storekeeper/Narrator years earlier. The Newcomer keeps aloof from the other residents but receives letters and visits from two women, assumed by the community to be his wife and his lover. From the older of the two, the presumed Wife, the Storekeeper gleans his only bit of information about the Man's past, that he had once been an internationally famous basketball star. The former athlete picks up his mail at the general store; the owner habitually hands it to him without being asked. However, on one occasion when the Man and the Girl are at the store together, the Storekeeper departs from his established custom and, in response to an obscure impulse, withholds two letters written by the Woman. When he reads them months later, he learns that the Girl is actually the Man's daughter. Shortly thereafter, we find him musing about his discovery at the chalet where the Man has just committed suicide.

Like the rest of the novel, the opening lines reveal more about the Narrator than the man who is the subject of his story: his tacit assumption of knowledge surpassing that of ordinary mortals, a fragmented presentation (both psychological and visual) of any subject he cares to describe, and a teasing, toying withholding of information from the reader. His reference to the lack of faith and the apology disclosed by the Man's hands suggests questions to which he presumably holds the answers: lack of faith—in what? apology—for what? The situation prompts a third question: will the Narrator vouchsafe the answers to the sorts of questions his tale invites?

The kinds of information found in conventional novels are conspicuously absent in Onetti's work. The characters singled out by name in Los adioses are the least prominent, appearing fleetingly if at all, while the major characters are unnamed. The latter are designated by their occupation or physical traits such as their sex, health, or age—attributes that constitute broad categories rather than individualizing characteristics. Reinforcing this “insistently generic vision,”⁴ Onetti uses the definite article in relation to characters of whom the reader has no previous knowledge: “the” man, “the” woman, “the” girl, et al., step onto the stage from nowhere. The author's distinctive preference for the definite article, the tendency to make his characters nameless, and his practice of introducing pronouns without prior antecedent allow him to avoid or postpone precise identification.⁵ Such procedures are instrumental in his achieving an impersonal tone, which in turn strengthens the impression of a deity viewing creation from afar.

Settings in Onetti's fiction tend to exist outside the usual confines of experience. His favorite locale is the imaginary city of Santa María, the “mythological” world which has prompted frequent comparison with Faulkner's. In Los adioses, time and place are indefinite. Speech characteristics link the characters to the River Plate countries, and allusions to a radio and motor vehicles place the time within the twentieth century, but more specific temporal clues and all place names have been omitted.

The information which the Narrator chooses to impart reflects the narrow range of his personal concerns, and he imposes this idiosyncratic view on the reader while asserting his own superior powers: “He wishes he had seen no more of the Man than his hands, they were all he wanted, all he needed, to see in order to know that the Man was fatally sick. He would not recover because he did not care enough to do so.”⁶ The claim to privileged knowledge implicit in such comments sets the Narrator apart from ordinary mortals even as the arbitrary nature of the information he chooses to disclose or withhold gives the reader a heightened awareness of his own dependency on another's consciousness, the dependency of an inferior on a superior being.

To justify the superiority he claims, the Narrator must refer to his dealings with others, a relationship which approximates the one he has with the reader. The person with whom he converses most frequently is the male Nurse, to whom, following a long-established custom, he makes “unerring” predictions regarding the prospects for recovery of each new arrival. Toying with his interlocutor, the Narrator whets the Nurse's desire to speak by deliberately alternating between signs of attentiveness and inattentiveness, keeping him waiting when he is eager to talk, and disappointing him by not asking the question he longs to hear. Further evidence of the Storekeeper's presumed superiority is provided by the implied comparisons he is prone to make between himself and others, always to his own advantage. He disclaims interest in what people write in their letters since they all say the same things and say them poorly. He refrains from expressing certain thoughts to the Nurse because he deems the latter incapable of comprehending. Commenting that loneliness renders people capable of committing all sorts of vile actions, he hastens to exempt himself from the general condition: “Hablo de ellos, los demás, no de mí” (127). The undisguised contempt he shows for persons ranging from his closest companion to humanity in general stresses the distance separating him from other, lesser mortals.

At the same time that he is claiming an extraordinary perspicacity, the Storekeeper points out the gaps in his knowledge, lacunae which he supplements through guesswork and supposition. Paradoxically, the repeated occasions when he qualifies his commentary with such terms as “I guessed” or “I imagined” convert these uncertainties to strengths. The uncommon self-awareness demonstrated by his recognition of his own limitations makes him appear the more trustworthy in the situations he unfolds to the reader. His care to label his speculations for what they are tends to obscure the other instances when he makes no distinction between the observed and the imagined. In the latter case, many of his assumptions are derived from everyday experience, and since they duplicate the process each of us follows daily in our individual lives, we have little inclination to question them.

The narrator follows a pattern of fact, interpretation, and conclusion, presented in rapid sequence. Fact: the Man had been a famous athlete. Interpretation: his pride in his superb body had been the nucleus of his sense of identity. Conclusion: the certainty of death troubles him less than the loss of the identity he had been accustomed to deriving from sporting triumphs and public recognition. The sequence in this case is one that must be reconstructed by the reader. The Storekeeper, describing his first encounter with the Man, declares him to be haunted by something more frightening to him than death. Neither then nor later does he relate that fear to its source. The task is left to readers who seek some basis for the Narrator's startling affirmation about a perfect stranger.

Frequently the sequence is initiated by a trivial detail: the Man drinks a beer in the most obscure area of the store. Interpretation: he wants to efface himself. Conclusion: by distancing himself from his surroundings, he seeks to deny their reality and thus the illness which has brought him into the Storekeeper's world. Once the Narrator has stated his initial observation and hinted at his interpretation, all that he sees and hears thereafter serves to confirm that first impression.⁷ The Man refuses to mingle socially with the others—to dress, to act, to talk as they do. Each new manifestation of aloofness calls forth a restatement by the Narrator of his interpretation and conclusion. His originally obscure pronouncements gain progressively in clarity and precision while the tone of authority which he maintains throughout is reinforced by the weight of repetition. And once this process is under way, the distinction between the real and the imagined becomes increasingly blurred. The Storekeeper combines what he has seen, what he knows, and what he imagines to describe scenes he has never witnessed.

The Storekeeper's seeming concern for accurate detail surfaces when he reports two slightly differing versions of an attempt by the Girl to secure medical attention for her companion. The triviality of the incident sheds little or no light on what is ostensibly the matter of primary interest: in this case, the Man's physical condition. The significance of the anecdote arises from its insinuation of deeper, more basic issues: whom can we believe; when can we believe; what can we believe? Thus, Onetti sets up and sustains a dynamic tension between opposing forces—one in support of the Narrator's credibility, the other calculated to undermine it—as preparation for the unwary reader's final discovery that the true issue all along has not been the Man and his circumstances but the reliability of the Narrator. Only after that credibility has been irrevocably destroyed do we look back to see how few of his statements can be considered fact and how much is mere supposition. The data offered as truth within the framework of the novel are so incomplete and so susceptible to conflicting interpretations that the validity of almost all information is questionable. Is the Girl really the Man's daughter? Is the Storekeeper a woman? And, for that matter, is the Woman married to the Man?⁸

The principal relationship therefore proves to be the one established with the reader, the fictional ones having functioned as means toward that end. The reader approaches the story with expectations formed from his previous literary experience, expectations which the Narrator immediately sets out to defraud. Tension arises between the reader, who seeks information, and the Narrator, who withholds it. Faint stirrings of resentment (the Narrator isn't doing his job) may develop into antagonism in consequence both of the manner of reporting and the character of the reporter.

His disregard for the ordinary virtue of cleanliness, manifested when he describes his store, can be expected to offend all readers, regardless of their social and cultural differences. And our nascent antipathy toward the Narrator is strengthened on moral grounds as the result of his gossip, his prying curiosity, his petty exercise of power, and his sordid imagination. Elements such as these, calculated to arouse a negative response, both emotional and judgmental, draw us into the fictional world where we fall into the same modes of behavior as the characters we observe: reacting, interpreting, and judging.

A devaluation of morals (“la devalorización nihilista de los asideros morales del hombre”)⁹ is characteristic of Onetti's work. Among the men and women he portrays, the values we are accustomed to calling the “higher” ones are virtually non-existent, nor do we find the characters suffering over moral choices. Yet moral considerations provide the underpinnings of Los adioses, where everyone—Narrator, community, reader—is constantly engaged in passing judgment. Convinced that the Man and the Girl are lovers, the people of the community fill the air with censure. Just as the presumed offense infringes upon a basic societal norm, the community's eagerness to criticize the Man conforms to another familiar human trait. The rectitude of his critics, already suspect because of the close link between their indignation and the Athlete's persistence in remaining an outsider, is definitively undermined by the ending's tidy reversal of the roles of guilt and innocence. The evil has truly been in the eye of the beholder, an evil in which we, as readers receptive to the Narrator's faulty version of events, are implicated. As Frankenthaler says, “El lector, igual al almacenero, siente vergüenza por haber participado en la creencia de relaciones anormales cuando en realidad se trata de una historia de devoción filial. …”¹⁰ Luchting adds that the guilt which we as readers share with the Narrator is so vital and overwhelming a part of the novel as to make us its true protagonists.¹¹

The narrator's feelings of guilt, however, are another matter altogether. Ordinary moral considerations generally concern him no more than the squalor of his store. What he does care about—and care deeply—is maintaining his superior status in his own eyes and in the eyes of others. He fails to join in the general condemnation because his interest is concentrated on the fulfillment of his prophecy. Just as his demeanor when the Nurse wants to talk is calculated to disguise his interest in the subject, his delay in reading the Man's letters may be explained by a similar motive, acted out before an audience of invisible spectators. After reading the letters, he tells us clearly, he feels ashamed. He feels tempted to go about proclaiming the couple's innocence and to pay them a call in friendly solidarity. But what in others would be recognition of a wrong along with a desire to make retribution takes on a different cast in this instance, as the Narrator refers to his fury on discovering his error, his sense of humiliation, his injured pride—reactions which suggest that the shame he experiences originates in his failure to assess the situation accurately. The blow to his self-esteem is magnified by the fact that he has committed the same error as the people whose judgment he is accustomed to despising. Consequently, his mental processes turn at once to the task of redeeming himself in his own eyes. His reconstruction of events—in other words, the entire novel—obeys this need for self-justification disclosed in the final chapter.¹² To our earlier awareness that the story unfolding before us is filtered through another's consciousness, we now add the distinct possibility that our authority and guide may be altering reality to conform to the dictates of his own powerful emotional need.

The manipulative tendency, which he displays in his relations with the Nurse, also occasions deviations from his accustomed role of passive observer. The immediate interest which he takes in the Girl and which, he speculates later, may correspond to his unconsciously associating her with the Man leads him to respond to her need for transportation by driving her to the hotel. By the time of her subsequent visit, he has shed his willingness to assist her because he wants to see the Woman triumph. Having compared her chances with the Girl's and decided that the Woman is the more likely to win, he anticipates an outcome that becomes the one he desires, and both his thoughts and actions are directed toward that end.

Nowhere is his desire to influence the course of events more evident than in the “undeclared duel,” which he characterizes as a battle of wills in which he seeks wordlessly to remind the Man of the illness the latter wishes to forget. Reflecting on the situation, the Storekeeper reveals that he feels “responsable del cumplimiento de su destino, obligado a la crueldad necesaria para evitar que se modificara la profecía, seguro de que me bastaba recordarlo y recordar mi espontánea maldición, para que él continuara acercándose a la catástrofe” (135). When the Nurse, commenting sympathetically on the beneficial effects of the Woman's presence, suggests the possibility of the Man's making a full recovery, the Storekeeper mentally resists the suggestion with an absurd hope.

The silent duel which he invests with so much importance may well exist entirely in his mind. The two men are virtually unknown to each other, and their conversations are limited to the minimum required for the Man to purchase a beer. Yet the Storekeeper supposes his adversary to be observing him, studying his possible motivations, reaching conclusions, and reacting in various ways to his presence. Such conduct, inconsistent with the Man's observed indifference, is characteristic of the Storekeeper, who assumes his own interest to be reciprocated by those for whom he is at most a marginal figure.

At times his pose of dispassionate observer yields to the open manifestation of emotion: “Sin alegría pero excitado pude explicarme la anchura de sus hombros y el exceso de humillación con que ahora los doblaba …” (132). Phrases like “the purity” of the Man's incredulity, his “sweet tenacity,” his “atrocious resolve” provide early signals that the Narrator will not long maintain an emotional distance from his subject. Yet despite repeated analysis the nature of his feelings toward the Man remains clouded: “Nunca supe si llegué a tenerle cariño” (128).

If the Narrator's manifest loneliness accounts in part for his interest in a man he scarcely knows, it cannot explain the intensity of that interest nor why it is riveted on that particular individual. Once his obsessive concern has been established, however, it necessarily extends to the Woman whom all assume to be the Man's wife. Though he denies taking sides, he has predicted that she will defeat her rival and wants to see that prediction fulfilled. At times his reflections show him reacting as if he were the wronged wife: “estará más cómodo si la odiara” (155). His identification with the Woman's cause points us toward a possible explanation of his motivations for appropriating the Man's mail: a desire to punish him for his involvement with the Girl and the obscure hope of helping the Woman should the disruption of her correspondence with her husband stimulate a revival of conjugal concern.

Such speculations as this last one, encouraged by the ambiguities of the Narrator's partial disclosures, are inevitably influenced by the subjectivity and identity of the reader. Both reader and Narrator experience a common need to use their personal store of knowledge and beliefs about life to supplement the meager quantity of information vouchsafed them. Their shared tendencies heighten the effect of verisimilitude while simultaneously encouraging and undermining the reader's trust.

When the locale shifts to the hotel, the narration is taken up by the Nurse and the hotel Maid in conversation with the Storekeeper. The transition is necessary for obvious structural reasons since they were on the scene while the Narrator was not. But, equally important, their secondhand accounts, influenced by their respective biases (the Nurse's antagonism toward the Man and the Maid's hypocritical allegiance to conventional morality), are thirdhand by the time they reach the reader, with the result that the accuracy of their remarks is rendered even more suspect. Efforts to distinguish which comment originates with whom are hindered by the unmistakable imprint of the Narrator's peculiar phrasing, evident in the remarks made by all three. Even though the lessons of common experience lead us to expect reported conversations to be paraphrased rather than recalled verbatim, the Narrator's phrasing of the three-way conversation contributes to the climate of uncertainty. If his voice exhibits itself in his reconstruction of the words of others, is it not plausible, even probable, that his mentality subtly alters to a greater or lesser extent the content of what they have said?

Our accumulating perceptions that the Narrator, like ourselves, projects his personality onto the circumstances and events around him ultimately lead to a situation of radical doubt in which we struggle to determine how much of the vision expressed corresponds to the world without and how much to the world within. The issue reaches a climax in the final chapter, where the Narrator, learning of his erroneous conclusions, stands unmasked, stripped of his pretensions of infallibility, and reduced to the same level as the error-prone, ordinary person he despises. At this nadir of self-esteem, the traits of temperament which have distinguished him thus far—his pride and will to power—reassert themselves, enabling him to wrest a subjective triumph from an objective defeat. His error, he concludes, was more apparent than real since the Girl, whether mistress or daughter, was still the Woman's rival. As his new-found knowledge is converted from a source of shame to a renewed sense of superiority, he reaffirms the gulf between him and the community, whose access to the truth is dependent on what he chooses to impart or conceal. Moreover, his mental picture of the trio and, by implication, any embellishments and alterations he may care to make have become more important to him than the actual individuals: “Me sentía lleno de poder, como si el hombre y la muchacha, y también la mujer grande y el niño, hubieran nacido de mi voluntad para vivir lo que yo había determinado” (175).

This insight into the creative process, which exalts subjectivity at the expense of external realities, fully restores his sense of power with the accompanying trappings and prerogatives of divinity. The Olympian assurance which had distinguished his earlier pronouncements emerges anew in his decision to pardon the Man for defying the preordained order of events. After all, he consoles himself, even though he did not foretell the suicide, he did predict correctly that the Man would not recover from his illness. The covert, unintended fictionalizing which we perceive in the earlier chapters has at last become an activity which the Narrator not only acknowledges but exalts—in justification of one critic's remark that the entire book is a metaphor for the author's task.¹³

Central to that task is the author's relationship with his creation, a relationship which the Narrator's reflections render analogous to the bond between God and man.¹⁴ The faculties bordering on the superhuman which he attributes to himself are all the more noteworthy for the extent to which they are restricted to his inner, mental world. Judgment and will are paramount. External circumstances, initially of great concern, pale in importance before his insights into the creative process. Transforming the people he observes in life into the creatures of his imagination permits him the sense of power his temperament demands. The concluding paragraph, which completes the cyclical course of the novella, shows him watching in a self-congratulatory mood as the Girl bends over her father's body. Past and future converge as his memory of the original prognosis merges with yet another confident glimpse into the Girl's future.

Notes

1. Estelle Irizarry, “Procedimientos estilísticos de J. C. Onetti,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, Nos. 292-94 (1974), 675.

2. Mario Benedetti, “Juan Carlos Onetti y la aventura del hombre,” in Homenaje a Juan Carlos Onetti: Variaciones interpretativas en torno a su obra, comp. Helmy F. Giacoman (Long Island City: Anaya-Las Américas, 1974), p. 70. Hereafter cited as Homenaje.

3. My use of capital letters for the generic designations Onetti assigns his characters deviates from his punctuation and reflects my purpose of bringing the characters into sharper focus.

4. Irizarry, p. 675.

5. Irizarry, p. 675.

6. Juan Carlos Onetti, Los adioses, in Triple espera: novelas cortas de hispanoamérica, ed. Djelal Kadir (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), pp. 121-22. Subsequent references to Los adioses are from this edition and are cited within the text.

7. Cf. José Luis Coy, “Notas para una revalorización de Juan Carlos Onetti: ‘Los adioses,’” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, Nos. 292-94 (1974), 498-99.

8. The three questions are raised in Wolfgang A. Luchting, “El lector como protagonista de la novela: Onetti y Los adioses,” Nueva Narrativa Hispanoamericana, 1, No. 2 (1971), 182, 179 and 182, respectively. Other critics have mentioned some of the same uncertainties.

9. Carace Hernández, “Juan Carlos Onetti: Pistas para sus laberintos,” in Homenaje, p. 262.

10. Marilyn R. Frankenthaler, J. C. Onetti: La salvación por la forma (New York: Abra Ediciones, 1977), p. 52.

11. Luchting, pp. 175-84.

12. Cf. Coy, especially pp. 499-501.

13. Luchting, p. 184, does not elaborate on the ideas suggested by his phrase.

14. In his novel La vida breve (1950), Onetti makes his most probing inquiry into the relationship between the world in which the writer lives and the fictional reality he creates.