SOURCE: "Temporal Simultaneity and the Theme of Time Travel in a Fantastic Story by Adolfo Bioy Casares," in Essays on Argentine Narrators, Albatros Hispanofila, 1982, pp. 105-58.

Meehan is an American translator, critic, and professor of Spanish language and Spanish-American literature, specializing in Argentine fiction.

Adolfo Bioy Casares is probably best known as the author oí La invención de Morel (1940) and as long-time friend and collaborator of his more famous compatriot, Jorge Luis Borges. However, over a period of forty years Bioy Casares has also created an impressive corpus of original prose fiction which includes eleven books of short stories and seven novels and novelettes. The bulk of Bioy's writings, largely overlooked by critics, may, like those of Borges, be broadly classified as fantastic literature.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the narrative structure and the fantastic themes of temporal simultaneity and time travel in "El...