Although a reflection of conditions … in Uruguay and Argentina, Onetti's novelistic world transcends geographical bounds and is in essence the fictionalized spiritual landscape of contemporary man, a spiritual world that can be situated in the black-literature tradition of Céline and Sartre and that owes a largely technical debt to Dos Passos and Faulkner….

Onetti's work is marked by a fundamental ambiguity that appears in a variety of guises: as doubt, uncertainty, enigma, vagueness, obscurity, inexplicability, indistinctness, unreality, fantasy. (p. 260)

On the surface El astillero is structured around one basic narrative thread: Larsen's return to Santa María after a five-year time lapse, his involvement in Puerto Astillero in the Petrus shipyard and the parallel development of a relationship with the shipyard owner's mentally defective daughter, his inability to maintain his position as general manager of the shipyard, and his ultimate abandonment of Puerto Astillero in one of...