In the 1930s two major writers, the Argentine Roberto Arlt and the Uruguayan Juan Carlos Onetti, addressed the theme of the office worker. Although neither saw the office as a microcosm of society in the direct, social-realist way that the 1920s’ writers did, Arlt nevertheless ventured into bureaucratic territory with a strong social and political agenda. Onetti's focus, meanwhile, is more psychological and existential. What the two share is acute awareness of life as narrative, which they use in exploring the linguistic, visual and social structures that shape identity.

There is in Arlt's writing career a progression from cultural marginality to a more confident, evaluative stance, and this changing status is reflected in his choice of protagonists. Thus, Silvio Astier of El juguete rabioso (1926), is a poor, basically delinquent boy from the suburbs, who turns his hand to various trades, finally becoming a salesman for a paper wholesaler. Remo Erdosain, the protagonist of Los siete locos (1929), and Los lanzallamas (1931), is older and more established: a married man who works for a sugar wholesaler. Although not an office worker, he is a white-collar worker, very much in the mould of Mariani's clerks. However, in Arlt's novel (ironically, considering that he, unlike Mariani, was married with a child) there is no grim, responsible resignation, based on the economic needs of the family, but rather an explosion, a delirium. An impoverished and precarious (though respectable) life, a disappointed wife, the impulse to grovel, dreams of a wealthier lifestyle, the threat of tuberculosis, a sense of injustice – all these elements found in the lives of Mariani's characters are shared by Erdosain. But Erdosain is not destined to be constrained by the grind of everyday reality; rather, he leaves behind the white-collar existence and enters a world of fantasy, introspection and melodrama. Erdosain, like Mariani's Lacarreguy, steals from his employer, but it is a relatively small, frivolous theft. Thereafter, the double novel – one of the key works of twentieth-century Argentine literature – combines an intense, vivid, anguished exploration of the alienated psyche of the contemporary River Plate urban dweller, with an extravagant tale of political conspiracy. The chaotic exuberance of the work witnesses and reflects the uncertainty in the final years of Radical government.