Señas de identidad [Marks of Identity] is the detailed and intimate, yet broad and panoramic exploration of a personal crisis. Álvaro Mendiola, the author and protagonist (or perhaps Unamuno's term "agonist" would be more appropriate) portrays his own experience as a member of a specific generation of young Spaniards who were born during the thirties, and for whom the Civil War is one of their childhood memories. He is the descendant of a tradition-bound family of industrialists and landowners whose values he despises…. The complex contradictions between these profound roots in a reactionary and dying social class, and Álvaro's conscious efforts to align himself sincerely and integrally with progressive social and political causes are what impell him toward the crisis of conscience that he attempts to explain and understand in this extensive self-examination. (p. 3)

Álvaro writes this complex autobiography as he looks back upon the experience of acute crisis he describes. He takes the reader with him through three August evenings and into the morning following his "breakdown". But the novel's real substance is the highly elaborated flashbacks that reveal all that has led up to Álvaro's most anguished hours of confusion and paralysis.

In order to examine his experience and judge whether it is or is not integral to forming an authentic notion of his own identitiy, Álvaro, as narrator, objectifies that experience as he writes. In a rather literal sense, he "goes out of his mind" so that he may see his experience more clearly. In narrative terms this objectification is achieved through the perspective adopted by the author: Álvaro Mendiola is actually looking back on not one, but several versions of himself. (p. 4)

[The] narrator is never, up until the final two pages of the novel, able to refer to himself using the pronoun "I" (yo). Instead, there are two main autobiographical subjects here: one is referred to as "you" (tú), and the other as "Álvaro," or simply "he" (él). It is as though the use of the "I" would assume an integration, a wholeness and unity of self that Álvaro is simply incapable of achieving as he looks at himself. The committed, definitive and integrated "I," therefore, has no place in his vocabulary as he examines his experience.

When referring to either of these subjects (tú or él) of his autobiography, Álvaro is referring to aspects of himself which he sees as somehow distinct from one another, and distinct from the person who is described as suffering this crisis of identity. At the same time, whether the narrator uses "tú" or "Álvaro" as his subject implies in either case an attitude toward that subject or aspect of himself which he is describing in the past. "Tú" conveys a sense of intimacy and identity, while not necessarily implying affection. The implicit relationship with this "tú", in fact, may be one of intense love and hatred at the same time. In contrast to the more intimate "tú", "Álvaro" or "él" as subject, implies a more objectified view of that aspect of the narrator's personality in the past. A sense of estrangement, of personal distance and even a lack of recognition is introduced where the experience of "Álvaro" rather than "tú" is the narrative's subject. (pp. 5-6)

"Álvaro" seems most basically to be a witness, an observer, a person through whose eyes and consciousness we understand the historical and human context of the narrator's past experience. (p. 6)

In the biography of "Álvaro," subject of … flashbacks in the third person, we [see] an example of a "novela testimonial," the biography of a young bourgeoise intellectual that traces his abortive attempt to escape the moral chaos of his own social class (seen in his family and his friend, Sergio), and, as an intellectual, to involve himself in a committed way to a struggle for social justice. But this biography of "Álvaro" is actually an autobiography, and the Álvaro we have seen so far is also the "tú" we encounter so often in this narrative. (p. 9)

If "Álvaro" embodies the narrator's capacity to bear witness to and chronicle the events of his life and his circumstances, then "tú" represents his affective capacities; when using "tú" as his subject, the narrator is elaborating his past experience at a subjective and more intimate level. From this perspective, the narrator touches upon the most elemental and unchangeable aspects of his own character. (p. 10)

In isolation, the portions of the novel narrated in the second person singular have a distinctly negative tone. They relate the profoundest and most permanent aspects of the narrator's subjective experience. Beneath the surface of the testimonial of "Álvaro" runs the deeper current of an impassioned confession (tú). The two currents most often run counter to one another. There always seems to be an ironic distance between "Álvaro" and "tú." Emotions and hatred clash with ideals, intuitive impulses and needs contradict conscious moral convictions, deep-rooted personal rebellion clouds his ability to see objectively, and action finally becomes impossible for him.

Álvaro's lack of personal integration is the novel's very subject then. Its coherence as a narrative rests in the process through which the author analyzes his own emotional and intellectual experience, which grows out of and contributes to that same lack of integration. It is the process of self-analysis and the experience so minutely analyzed that is central here, and not the sort of synthesis or philosophical view of that experience that we might expect to find in a more traditional confessional autobiography. (pp. 15-16)

[In] the final pages of his chronicle, having declared himself a pariah, the living contradiction of all that the official order of Spain has come to stand for, Álvaro has enabled himself to finally use the first-person as subject, to refer to himself with the committed and now definitive "yo."

The voices which opened the novel condemning Álvaro after his exile in France return now to assert the permanent victory of their moral and social order, and to send him once again into exile…. The novel ends with an ambiguous and melancholy tone. Álvaro seems to have derived a new sense of personal identity out of his crisis. But his rebellion as he finally expresses it here, seems puerile, the product of a personal rage that will again fail to find expression through effective channels. If Álvaro cannot formulate and realize his rebellion in social terms, it will remain private, eccentric and hermetic, easily dismissed by those he would attack, and posing no real threat to the order he opposes so vehemently. This final problem finds no resolution in Señas de identidad.

The only link that continues to unite Álvaro with Spain is the beautiful language they have in common. He now sees that even the language has become enslaved to the self-sustaining interests of the established order and its mythology…. It is the language itself, then, and its inherent function as the transmitter of the ruling class' mythologies and values that perpetuate the hated order and determine the crippled consciousness of Spain—this language will become both the medium for and the object of Álvaro's attack as a writer in exile. In Señas de identidad, there is little indication of the direction Álvaro will take; but out of his new sense of personal identity as outcast and writer in fierce rebellion, Reivindicación del Conde Don Julián (Goytisolo's subsequent novel, 1970) is offered as the definitive annihilation of Álvaro's roots in the bourgeoise culture of Spain, and the most devastating of attacks on that culture, its values and its mythologies. (pp. 18-19)