Critics have said that Niebla shows both the protagonist's emergence into conscious existence and the author's attempt to create himself through the novel. But the plot repeatedly points up the character's self-deception, which makes the author's effort problematical. Niebla begins with a comic view of Augusto Pérez's falling in love with the image of a woman he has invented; it ends with a philosophical defense of the confusion of fiction and reality. The ambiguity caused by these incompatible approaches is heightened by the similarities between Augusto's ideas and Unamuno's. The ironic exposure of selfdelusion alternates with a serious theory of fantasy. In the last chapters Unamuno, like Augusto, seems to argue for total delusion. This view is most explicitly formulated in the “Historia de Niebla” which appeared as a prologue to the 1935 edition. In it Unamuno fuses legend, novel, nivola, and eternal life into the image of a communal mist in which one can be saved. Throughout his life Unamuno tried to see himself as a substantial entity and not merely an idea in the minds of others. As that goal became more elusive, he chose instead to imagine that the world was a dream in which he could be eternally represented. In order to perpetuate his illusory self, he turned all reality into fiction. Niebla anticipates this maneuver.