Onetti, Juan Carlos. The Shipyard. Originally Published

¶ … Onetti, Juan Carlos. The Shipyard. Originally Published in 1961.

Plot Summary

The Shipyard tells the story of a man in his fifties whom once worked as an owner of a brothel and now has cultivated the higher aspiration of becoming the owner of a bankrupt, decaying, and rusting shipping company. The protagonist of the novel has, at the beginning of the text, recently returned to a Uruguayan town named Santa Maria. The man despises this town, because the governor exiled him from the city's confines for five years. He wishes to prove himself, however, and 'show up' those who treated him so cruelly in the past. The man's name is Larsen, but he is also known as Juntacadaveres, or the Corpse Collector, due to the age and appearance of the prostitutes he used to purvey when he was operating a brother. Larsen decides to become the General Manager of the local shipyard by marrying the owner's daughter, a girl so unattractive no one will marry her -- however the Corpse Collector believes his former trade has steeled his stomach to any such unpleasantness.

However, Larson discovers that the shipyard is rusting and has gone bankrupt. He only has two colleagues at work, with whom he wastes time, sharing meals with him to pass the lonely hours. Rather than moving forward in travel and in commerce, as he originally hoped to, and in social and monetary standing, the protagonist finds himself caught up in a never-ending circularity of pointless existence, of dialogue with no meaning, and with meetings with no meaning or point. The business the protagonist aspires to gain is worthless, as are the laborers and all of the individuals that populate the world around him. Eventually, the shipyard to the protagonist becomes a symbolic landscape of his own ruin as he stares and looks around him at the yard, which although it still stands erect, is "exaggeratedly strutting." Simply to get to his pointless labor, Larsen must avoid "pieces of hanging iron with shapes and names" like human beings that rest "imprisoned on a confusion of wires and penetrated into the shade, into the distant cold, into the reticence of the shed. He reviewed the desks, the threads of rain, the nets of dust and spider webs, the reddish-black machines which continued simulating dignity."

How the book relates to the society and its ongoing events during its the time period

Juan Carlos Onetti was himself Uruguayan like Larson, although the city of Santa Maria is a fictional setting. Onetti worked as a reporter and often came into conflict with the ruling government because of his liberal political views, which resulted in his becoming incarcerated in a mental institution for a period of time. During the bulk of the time when he dwelt there, Uruguay was under a fascist dictatorship and underwent tremendous political as well as economic instability. In The Shipyard, Onetti stresses the pointlessness of capitalist existence, of using money to define one's happiness in life, as Larsen prostitutes himself to the decaying shipyard as the man used to prostitute women.

Style