SOURCE: “The Estranged Man: Kafka's Influence on Arreola,” in Revue des Langues Vivantes Tijdschrift voor Levende Talen, Vol. 37, No. 3, 1971, pp. 305-08.

In the following essay, Tomanek shows how several of Arreola's short stories echo the literary style and themes of Franz Kafka, with “El Guardagujas” in particular expressing the futility of man's search for identity in an insane world.

Most of the recent anthologies of Spanish-American fiction include the short story “El Guardagujas” written by the contemporary Mexican writer Juan José Arreola¹. This story deserved unanimous praise for its literary eminency. Though many critics commented on Arreola's major work Confabulario², serious criticism has been replaced by simply linking Arreola with the Existentialists, and his individual style has been taken care of by branding it with the name “magic realism”³.

Confabulario is composed of 110 parts—a special case in Mexican literature—many of them fragmentary, which form an interesting...