Juan Carlos Onetti wrote El Pozo in 1938,. Discuss the theme of alienation drawing on examples from El Pozo.

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Discuss the theme of alienation drawing on examples from “El Pozo”.

Juan Carlos Onetti wrote El Pozo in 1938, shortly before the beginning of World War II. Like most writers of this time and with the inspiration of European authors such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, Onetti employed an existentialist viewpoint in his literature.

This existential attitude is passed on to the protagonist, Linscero who often appears to be disorientated and confused, living in this apparently meaningless world.

The story takes place in a boarding house in a war torn country. From the beginning of the novel, we dub Linscero to be a lonely man, getting by on what he can. He describes his situation as, himself being “…solo y entre la mugre, encerrado en la pieza”, (alone, surrounded by dirt, shut up in that room). Later he also details how he  

Alienation is defined by the Miriam-web dictionary as being “the estrangement between the self and the objective world or between different parts of the personality”. Juan Carlos Onetti’s character Linscero in El Pozo fits both these parts of this description. Through this discourse I would like to illustrate how this is achieved through an array of literary techniques and themes.

In general, Onetti’s books are led by unhappy, isolated and often depressed characters with an absurd state of mind, within the confines of a sordid world (from which they can only escape through the means of recreating memories, fantasies and dreams).

El Pozo treats the aimless life of Linscero, a man lost within a city where he is unable to communicate with others. The books complex fusion of reality with fantasy and inner experience make it one of the first distinctively modern Spanish American novels.

El Pozo, with the English translation “The Pit” may have significance in both referring to what the protagonist lack in emotion and the poor state of his abode. The story is about a man, attempting to come to terms that he is about to turn forty years old, who decides to write his memoirs, fantasies and life experiences in order to not only show something for his life (by giving it meaning and order), but also to escape the reality that he is isolated in his own home and lacks the ability to get up and make something of himself.

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Onetti, while being recognised as being a traditional novelist with this work (traditional novel: works pre 1940), also uses some modernist narrative techniques to suggest that he was ahead of his time. Techniques such as multiple strains of narration, free association and forms of evasion like spatial psychological and temporal distinctions of inner experience – including dreams, fantasies and memories – ushered in a new period of Latin American narrative and Onetti was at the forefront of this.

His ability to create such fantasies gives him the ability to create a false depiction of himself and a sense of ...

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