Onetti. Juan Carlos Onetti.

Mary-Lee Sullivan

But that was when, without my understanding completely what was happening, I began knowing things and exactly what we had gotten ourselves into, though I could never say it, just as one knows what a persons soul is like but can't describe it in words. (Onetti, "A Dream Come True" 59)

Few contemporary fiction writers have depended as heavily on the interpretive strategies of the reader as did Juan Carlos Onetti (1909-1994). Although his 1954 novella, Los adioses (Goodbyes), is one of his most demanding texts in this regard, it is also a hallmark of Onettian narrative in its controlled structuring of ambiguity. A close reading of the text reveals that it is, in fact, designed to draw maximally on the projective capacity of the reader. In the words of Fredric Jameson, "it is itself the inaugural narrative act that grounds the perception and interpretation of the events to be narrated" (xiii). The fact that the past 40 years of critical theorizing have failed to exhaust the responses elicited by Goodbyes would seem to confirm that the power of the text to draw on the unconscious projections of any given reader is inherent in its composition.