Juan Carlos Onetti, El astillero

There has been much discussion of Larsen, the protagonist of Onetti's El astillero, which was published in 1961. Claudio Canaparo, for example, identifies Larsen as a very specific type of failure as a human being: ‘Larsen's artistic failure is the result of an excess of understanding, pity and compassion; he is too clearheaded to be creative’ (1997: 599). He goes on to suggest that Larsen's self-image is based not on how the character feels or believes himself to be, but rather on what he knows he is not and cannot be. In Larsen there is a divide between on the one hand, a genuine sensitivity, and on the other, the fundamental sense of self: he does not have the inner force of an artist, who ‘would have been able to oscillate between the belief in an image and the certainty of a condition’ (1997: 599).

Before exploring the implications of these characteristics, it is useful to consider what Larsen actually is, the role he plays in the world – rather than what he might be. El astillero is centred on the office where Larsen works, which belongs to the defunct shipyard of Jeremías Petrus, S.A., and is located in Puerto Astillero, outside the city of Santa María. Larsen is an office worker, albeit one who, as we shall see, dreams of better things. That he is a dreamer is amplified in Juntacadáveres when Barthé's project to set up a brothel, using as manager Larsen, a white-collar employee of a provincial newspaper, finally becomes a real prospect:

In terms of the developing genre of narrative of the office, there is a clear connection between Larsen, and Onetti's and Arlt's protagonists from the 1930s. In ‘Avenida de Mayo’ and ‘El posible Baldi’, two early stories by Onetti set in Buenos Aires, the protagonists Suaid and Baldi both invent fantasy alternatives to the bureaucratic routine of their lives.