What happens in Welcome Bob by Juan Carlos Onetti?

Answer 1

The idea of 'action' or 'plot' is irrelevant here. the focus is not on the art of story-telling, as in Boccaccio's The Decameron or The Arabian Nights, but on creating a special psychological environment, or atmosphere: after reading it, the reader is left with feelings of envy, frustration, hatred, but also cynical satisfaction. through onetti's art the reader is taken out of his/her own mind and transplanted into the main character's. the reader's emotional experience thus becomes highly pure and authentic.

There are 3 main characters in this literary piece but the relations and tensions among them are not easy to describe:

1. The narrator, a cynical man, possibly a failure, whose name is not mentioned, is the oldest and directly addresses another mature, yet younger than him, man, named Bob. 2. Bob / Robert, once an idealistic, refined, pure, highly energetic young man, who used to despise the narrator for being a failure, is now a failure himself and has become cynical, too. 3. Ines, Bob's sister, an evanescent, almost absent, character, is the narrator's former fiancee. the narrator and ines are no longer together because, though it is not mentioned directly, bob did everything to prevent ines from staying with the man he despises so much.

Welcome Bob is written in the 1st person, as an interior monologue. but it also resembles a letter, not necessarily in its form, but in its content and way of addressing. the narrator 'welcomes' Bob to the world of failures who waste their lives in bars. Bob used to be different, used to belong to an intellectual elite of young people who had ideals, dreams and who opposed the cynicism of older ones. now he is exactly like the narrator, so he is ready to enter the narrator's world. now he can be called 'Robert'. Once envious of Bob for his looks and drive, the narrator is now satisfied with Robert's moral and physical decay.

There is something strange in the relationship between the 2 men. it seems that their relation, based on hatred and disgust, is even stronger than the relationship between the narrator and ines, which is supposed to be based on love. the author implies that the narrator's once strong feelings towards ines are diverted, after bob's intervention against their relationship, towards bob, now in the form of hatred. it also seems that the narrator is more inseparable from bob than from ines.

In this work, the narrator is 'I', bob is 'you', and ines is 'she'. so the only real, direct dialogue is the one between the 2 men. the woman is absent, she's only talked about. a men's society is thus suggested, based on aggressiveness and hatred, in which women play an unimportant role.