Onetti, el hombre de la cara aburrida, y el fracaso existencial

Abstract

This paper analyzes the human failure in Onetti's work as a central theme and basic attitude ubiquitous in his whole work. Onetti's alter ego, who is almost always discovered behind his characters, represents a failed man from River Plate who embodies the existential failure of all human beings. Behind Onetti's stories and characters is every man that entered the stage of maturity and only feels failure in his bones and nostalgia of an irretrievable and useless past. The onettian man becomes, lives and dies on failure as a starting point and as an end. Its heroes, degraded mediocre men, will attempt to escape in vain and get away from failure, changing their lives, creating new ones, imaginary or not. Creative writing, madness and memory are salvation paths that lead to new cycles of failure. This repeated circular process is the same that sinked the onnettian hero in "the pit of human failure" since his first novel, The Pit , published in 1939.