Abstract

The different ways in which Juan Carlos Onetti, Julio Cortazar and Severo Sarduy treat the literary figure of the double, or the splitting of characters, illustrates each of these writers' conceptions of identity. Furthermore, assuming that theories of identity presuppose more comprehensive theories of reality, the notion of the subject as represented in their works may elucidate their particular worldviews. The evolution of the notion of the subject from the narrative of Onetti to that of Cortazar and Sarduy, members of three consecutive literary generations, also reflects a more general evolution in the philosophical and ideological trends predominant in the western world throughout the last fifty years, in particular, the transition that leads from modernity to postmodernity. ;The work of Onetti is inscribed within existentialist thought. For him, the loss of stable foundations and absolute values, interpreted as an exile from paradise, and the conception of man as a being-in-time, with the consequent problematization of personal identity, results in an overall tragic and nostalgic mood. ;For Cortazar, who may be seen as a neo-romantic writer, and whose work shows a return to philosophical idealism, the scission that divides contemporary man from himself and his surroundings, leaving a feeling of pain and exile, is not constitutive of the human being but the result of a deviation in the course of western civilization that can and must be corrected. This opinion accounts for the hopeful and almost messianic mood that prevails in his works. ;According to Sarduy, who is particularly receptive to post-structuralist thought, there is no need to despair for the loss, or to hope for the recovery of absolute values and of a centered subject, for these are rhetorical constructs of a logocentric and metaphysical tradition. In fact, the disappearance of the subject, which he advocates, will also mean a liberation from both anxiety and illusion, and an apology for the pleasure of living, not projected into the past or the future, as forms of recuperating identity, but in the always different present