Unamuno wrote Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr in 1930, six years before his death. It is one of his best and most mature works. Encompassing so many contradictory aspects of human nature—the saintly and the diabolical, the magnanimous and the manipulative, the tolerant and the self-serving, the reasonable and the intuitive—Don Manuel has become a towering character in contemporary Spanish literature. Because of the work’s complexity,it lends itself to diverse interpretations and has attracted much critical attention.

Unamuno called his prose fiction nivolas. Like everything in Unamuno’s world, the nivola defies definition. Unamuno explains in Niebla (1914; Mist, 1928) that a nivola transcends genre and blurs the line between reality and fiction. For example, Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr consists of a mere thirty-five pages and so is neither a novel nor a short story. At the end of the work, the author transcends his role of invisible storyteller to comment on the significance of the characters, especially Angela. By introducing a personal interpretation of his own work, Unamuno eradicates the boundary between reader and writer. He uses an even more radical technique at the end ofMist, in which the author enters the work and is confronted by one of his characters.

Unamuno has often been called a pre-existentialist. Like characters in existentialist novels, Unamuno’s protagonists grapple with nothingness and the finality of human life. Unamuno explains in several of his essays that aside from the eternal life promised by the Church, there are two means to achieve immortality: through children and through art. That is why Don Manuel cultivates a “spiritual daughter” and Angela produces her “confession.”

In his commentary at the end of Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr, Unamuno says that he believes in Angela more than he believes in himself. For Unamuno the creation is more real than the creator because the work of art outlives the artist and attains a life of its own, as future generations reinterpret it. That is why, at the end of Mist, the author is unable to kill his character. That is also why Unamuno sometimes becomes a character in his own books; through art, he attempts to bestow immortality upon himself.

Thus, the creation process acquires transcendental significance. Just as the character creates the author in the sense that the author is not an author without his creation, so man creates God. Thus, creer es crear—believing is creating. By believing—in defiance of reason—an individual performs an act of will, an act of self-affirmation, that gives his own life meaning.