The connection Onetti-Saer. The free will of the narrator in Los adioses and Gloza

Abstract

The point of departure for this article is an essay, published in 2005, in which Juan Jose Saer comments on the well-known opening paragraphs of Juan Carlos Onetti’s Los adioses (1954). In these first paragraphs of the novel, the reading contract is established between narrator and reader, but its foundations are shaky: at the same time as the narrator claims authorship (and authority) in the most despotic terms, he also declares it completely relative. In this way, a number of important questions are posed, of which one is crucial: what is the role of the narrator of a story? The same question characterizes Juan Jose Saer’s Glosa (1986), a novel which centers on the (unreliable) transmission of narrative. The narrator’s unstable authority is undermined by a series of important paratexts, which all resound throughout the novel. The opening paragraph of the novel points to a similarly capricious power of narrative, but here, as in Los adioses, the narrator plays with the apparent instability and becomes a unique figure in the author’s oeuvre. Grounded in a narrative arbitrariness and a constant rewriting, these two texts establish a strong bond in their exploration of the paradoxes of narrativity.