ABSTRACT
The Friedrich Nietzsche of postcolonial studies has been the Nietzsche of the philosophy of difference and of the critique of Western metaphysics, which is to say a Nietzsche shorn of his most disturbing elements. This postcolonial Nietzsche is part of what Neil Larsen referred to as the "new irrationalist hybrid". Operating within a philosophy of difference, Nietzsche has rarely been an explicit reference. Nietzsche at the periphery inhabits a different perspective in Roberto Arlt’s novel. Arlt's characters live in one of the cities that are central to the world economy, but they live that experience as one of alienation and exclusion. Arlt's novel is heavily indebted to Dostoevsky and to his "hallucinatory realism". His own work as a journalist and crime reporter attunes his novel to the diversity of types in the modern city–he wrote a column called Buenos Aries Sketches.
