Punta de rieles, de Manuel Rojas: montaje irónico de un encuentro entre mundos

Abstract

Punta de rieles (1959) is a novel about the encounter between two worlds. Between a member of the traditional elite and a member of the common people in the process of proletarianization, both presented in the form of two subjects in crisis. This meeting is, therefore, an assembly not without irony; a technical idea that goes beyond the literary and seeks to address, synthetically, a crucial period in the history of Chile (the crisis of 1929) to reflect on the class relations that the country has built up to this moment and wonder the new relationships that the crisis and the transition towards industrialization promise. The text presented here seeks to reveal the roots of this problem and stakeholders; and show how it works and is stressed in Punta de rieles. All this, with the primary objective of studying this unjustly neglected work, looking to take charge of his discursive complexity and its genesis within the fiction of the great Chilean narrator.