Tubercular meningitis: suffering and disease of the narrator of Juan Carlos Onetti’s Los adioses (1954)

Abstract

Onetti’s novel Los Adioses (The Goodbyes/The Farewells) is a story told by a shopkeeper, about a former basketball player infected with tuberculosis. The reader is faced with the narrator’s unreliability, who creates a false story about a person he saw only once. Thus, the reader has to confirm that the purpose of the narrator’s above mentioned lie was to project himself into “the other”. He/She also perceives that the narrator’s indecorous and despicable speech is impregnated with delirium, speculation and contradiction, uncertainty and evasion, paranoia, and confusion between reality and unreality, changes of behavior, and anger; symptoms that all the tubercular meningitis sufferers have.