"El Tunel": Portrayal of Isolation

Abstract

El t~nel, a short novel by the Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato, is one of the most tightly structured portrayals of a character's existential isolation to be published in recent decades.' With the expressed intention of relating the story en forma escueta (p. 69), and believing that .. . el horror de la tragedia es Ilevado al maximo al ser expresado con sencilla precisi6n,'2 Sabato assumes the point of view of the protagonist Castel and exposes in the initial sentence the climactic act of the novel with a dramatic abruptness that calls to mind the opening of Camus' L'dtranger: Bastard decir que soy Juan Pablo Castel, el pintor que mat6 a Maria Iribarne ... (p. 11). With the final step in the protagonist's march toward isolation known from the outset, the author devotes himself to realizing the goal of present-day literature which he defines in Hombres y engranajes as un intento de profundizar el sentido de la existencia, una encarnizada tentativa de Ilegar hasta el fondo del problema (p. 107). In the case of El tiunel, the core of the problem can be summarized as the causes leading the protagonist to murder his mistress and thereby to condemn himself to complete isolation. In view of the complete integration of plot and character (in the Jamesian sense that all elements of plot contribute to and are determined by the inner reality or personality of a given individual-here the protagonist), the problem is one of portraying the character or behavior patterns of Castel and thereby exposing the reasons for his transformation into the solitary hombre del vtnel. The protagonist's isolation is synonymous with lack of communication with other human beings, a lack conveyed by Sabato through depiction of Castel's inabili y to relate with people in general (m nkind, society) and with his mistress Maria Iribarne in particular, through a grotesque dream metamorphosis, and through various images of windows and tunnels.