The Secret of Narrative: A Structural Analysis of Cervantes’s \u3ci\u3eNovelas Ejemplares\u3c/i\u3e

This article, which offers analyses of five Novelas ejemplares, sheds new light on a key structural feature of Cervantes’s short stories. Long before Henry James began to compose fictions defined by what Tzvetan Todorov would call an “essential secret,” Cervantes was already experimenting with fictional texts that disorient the reader by problematizing or by failing to reveal the plot’s “secret” or central truth. Thus, this study undertakes a close reading of Cervantes’s stories in order to reveal how gaps and contradictions in signification make for “secretive” texts whose conclusions unfold in a contradictory “double movement,” given that doubt, questions, and general uncertainty arise precisely when the texts pretend to be finally offering the reader a sense of closure