The novel “Pequeñas manejos” was written and published by Virgilio Piñera in the city of Buenos Aires. It features the narrator and the protagonist, Sebastián, who reveals an intimacy filled with terrors and anxieties, sometimes of banal motives but always authentic manifestations. The text seems to have some autobiographical discharges but the author separates himself from the character through humor.

Sebastián shows a kind of stoicism in the face of the humiliation to which he is subjected in the context of his relationship with those around him. Escape becomes for him the only way to resolve – read as evade – conflicts, and from this he is aware of his perpetual place in the world, from which he cannot exclude himself despite his attempts to escape.

The playfulness is also evident in Sebastián’s behavior, who places himself in the same context as Virgilio’s characters, who are perpetually struggling against emptiness and nothingness; he finds meaning through disappearance and reappearance, in a certain way a game of hide-and-seek in which his identity begins to become hidden and disguised.

His reluctance to delve into the human relationships he is forced to establish is evident throughout, all of which are superficial and marked by blindness, ignorance of his fellow human beings, and a lack of communication that, paradoxically, is conducive to his temperament.

However, towards the final chapters of the novel, we see a gradual transformation in the character’s way of seeing himself; part of his fear dissolves into the awareness of being different, while his intellect allows him to split into two, fostering self-analysis, a mental clarity that was, in a way, that of the writer regarding the marginalization of which he was a victim.

This text has the value of indirectly judging the social situation of the Republican era, only from which escape would ultimately be possible, an attitude that is inherent to almost all of its narrative.