ABSTRACT
Kipling and Chekhov, show that Quiroga had a conscious idea of the short story genre as some thing with its own laws and traditions, distinct from other kinds of narrative. Critics who have argued that the Latin American short story starts much earlier - Esteban Echeverria’s ‘El matadero’ (The Slaughterhouse) (written about 1838, published posthumously in 1871) is often suggested as a starting point, or even earlier short narratives in the chronicles of the Conquest - have not convincingly shown that these earlier writers were as conscious of a short story genre. Quiroga experimented with point of view - he told the same plot in ‘El hombre muerto’ (The Dead Man) (1920) and ‘Las moscas’ (The Flies) (1923), once from the point of view of the dying man, then from that of the flies buzzing around his corpse. He was able to incorporate into the same story a narration of what happens and of what the characters think is happening and hope will happen, and still leave room for the reader to come to a conclusion or make a judgment on the events - and all of this in a very few pages. ‘El hijo’ (The Son) (1928) is one of Quiroga’s most controlled experiments, and a masterpiece: the story tells of the son’s setting out on a hunt full of hopes and of the father’s imagining, waiting, and final madness, and yet the reader is required to complete the tale.
