THE METAPHYSICAL-PSYCHOLOGICAL TUNNEL (Essay on the novel The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato) - Part II

The novel The Tunnel of Sábato is narrated in the first person by the protagonist, Juan Pablo Castel, and in retrospect; that is to say, he begins by pointing out the outcome (the crime he committed) and immediately proceeds to tell us his story from the beginning. We assist as readers to their internal vision of the facts; the story comes to us as a direct testimony that comes from the center of the conflict, from the conscience of this character. This leads us to accompany the narration as an alter ego; With the advance of the story we go into the mind of the protagonist, we let ourselves be guided by his reasoning and we become direct witnesses of his particular way of interpreting reality. So Sábato justifies his choice:

… the delusional process that would lead to the crime would be more effective if it was described by the protagonist himself, making the reader suffer a little his own anxieties and doubts, finally dragging him with the "logic" of his own delirium until the murder of the woman (Sábato: 1964, 14).

The use by Sábato of the figure of the narrator-protagonist then has the objective of guiding us, readers, by the mental journey that the character makes until arriving at the crime, in such a way that we feel with him a certain identification. In fact, the novel is presented as a sort of allegation or testimony that Castel directs to its readers with the stated purpose of being understood:

I could reserve the reasons that moved me to write these pages of confession; but since I have no interest in being eccentric, I will tell the truth, which is quite simple anyway: I thought that they could be read by many people, since now I am famous; and although I do not have many illusions about humanity in general and the readers of these pages in particular, I am encouraged by the weak hope that someone will come to understand me. ALTHOUGH IT IS A SINGLE PERSON (Sábato: 1985, 14).

Thus, throughout the story, we find a narrator who recurrently and deliberately tells us about himself, who shows us his way of interpreting reality, his ideas, his motivations, his obsessions, his fears, his doubts, his reasonings .

We must bear in mind that even when other characters intervene in the narration, they all appear enunciated from the particular point of view of Castel; they are his projections. It is not possible for the reader to know the other actors in the plot, but only the narrator-protagonist's vision of them. Castel's descriptions of others and the relationships of their actions speak, before those of themselves, of himself. Likewise, the dialogues that he transcribes to us must be interpreted in a certain way as a continuity of his own soliloquy.

In the same way, the narrative rhythm is relegated to its subjectivity; continuously the story of the events is interrupted to give rise to different reflections on them. These jumps of chronological time to a subjective time contribute to guide the attention of the reader towards the consciousness of the protagonist. The same narrator recognizes, in a crucial passage of the novel, this confrontation between the objective time and the subjective time of the own experience:

I do not know how much time he spent on clocks, of that anonymous and universal time of clocks, which is alien to our feelings, to our destinies, to the formation or to the collapse of a love, waiting for a death. But from my own time it was an immense and complicated amount... (130).

Given that the events that are related and the interpretations that are exhibited of them, as well as the appearances of other characters, have their origin in that unique narrative figure that is Juan Pablo Castel; when analyzing the novel we must observe all the elements of it in relation to it. Because of this, our study will focus on this narrator-protagonist.