The Switchman | Literary Criticism & Book Review

The Switchman Critical Overview

When Confabulario was released in 1952, it was met with a generally warm reception. A decade later, however, when it was released with the rest of Arreola's published work in Confabulario total, it was met with great applause. By the 1960s, Arreola had earned his reputation as a skillful satirist. His fiction tends to lack traditional literary devices such as plot and character development; in these departures from literary convention, Arreola crafts stylistically original pieces grounded in allegory. Ross Larson, in Fantasy and Imagination in the Mexican Narrative , cites Arreola as a leader and revolutionary in Mexican literature during the 1950s in his use of "symbolic techniques to express other views of reality." He describes his work as "concise, ironic parables and satires that aspire to formal perfection." Arreola's work is characterized by a sense of the absurd, and the short stories in the collection, particularly "The Switchman," are...
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