Fiction Games Research Articles

Unamuno's Niebla: Existence and the Game of Fiction

Thus is brought before us in the opening sentences of Niebla a man who, clearly, is a dis-traido: statuesque perhaps-solid under the rain-, but not altogether there. The English term absentminded will do as a translation of distraido inasmuch as it gives us the idea of separation, division from oneself and the world, which helps us to understand why Augusto's action is so lacking in spontaneity, as though he were, indeed, and apparition, that which is only paradoxically a presence. It will not surprise us to hear other characters tell Augusto in the course of the novel that he is, indeed, a distraido, that he must take special care in order to survive; that at times he seems to be no more than a fictional being who has descended upon them for a while only. Augusto himself will come to think this, and almost every minute of his existence before us will be, like his first gesture, an effort to touch,