I’ve just finished reading Ernesto Sábato’s The Tunnel, and I have the feeling that Juan Pablo Castel is still talking. The novel opens without any attempt at suspense. Castel tells us immediately that he killed María Iribarne. There is no police investigation, no murderer to uncover, no final twist. Castel has already been tried. What he wants now is something else: to explain himself.
Though “explain himself” may not go far enough. He wants to make his case before the reader, arrange the events in order, lay out the evidence, and prove that there was a comprehensible chain of events behind the crime. Castel writes as though he were gripping us by the arm and saying: Pay attention. Don’t rush to judgment until you’ve heard me out. And we do.
Castel is a painter. At one of his exhibitions, María notices a small detail in one of his paintings: a solitary woman by the sea, seen through a window. No one else had paid much attention to the scene. The critics talked about other things, as critics tend to do. María, however, saw the window. For Castel, that was enough.
He concludes that this woman has understood him. Not just the painting, but all of him. María, he believes, has recognized a part of his life that had remained invisible to everyone else. From then on, Castel begins searching for her in the streets, imagining conversations, anticipating her answers, and mentally rehearsing every possible encounter.
By the time they finally become close, the relationship has already been compromised by something María knows nothing about: Castel does not arrive alone. He brings with him a character he has invented for her to play. María must be the woman from the window. She must understand him without hesitation, give the right answers to his questions, and confirm the extraordinary bond he believes exists between them. Every silence arouses suspicion. Every contradiction calls for cross-examination. The most ordinary gesture takes on the weight of a confession.
Castel watches everything: her tone of voice, how long she takes to answer, a sentence left unfinished, a visit, an absence. He regards himself as rigorous, almost scientific. He gathers clues, tests hypotheses, and reconstructs scenes he never witnessed. The problem is that his conclusions always get there before the facts do. He is not investigating in order to discover the truth. He is investigating in order to confirm what he already fears.
Gradually, his lucidity begins to look less reliable. Castel reasons constantly, but his thoughts always travel through the same closed circuit. One suspicion gives rise to another, then a third, which he later uses as evidence for the first. His logic folds in on itself and keeps running long after it has lost contact with reality.
That is what makes the novel so unsettling. Castel does not come across as a man entirely devoid of reason. Quite the opposite: he is intelligent, articulate, and quick to recognize the mediocrity of others. At times, he even manages to make us laugh. But his intelligence does not get him out of the tunnel, it simply gives him better lighting inside it.
An unwarranted analysis of Juan Pablo Castel
There is an idea in Melanie Klein’s psychoanalysis that helps us understand how Castel’s mind works without having to put him on an imaginary couch. Klein recognized early on how difficult it can be for us to hold together, within the same person, what we love and what we hate.
When someone gives us what we need, it is easy to see them as good, generous, and indispensable. When they frustrate us, they may suddenly appear cruel, indifferent, even persecutory. Emotional maturity demands something far less comfortable: accepting that both experiences involve the same person.
For Castel, María moves constantly between these two positions. At times, she is the only woman capable of understanding him, the sole witness to his loneliness, almost a form of salvation. Soon afterward, she becomes deceitful, vulgar, manipulative, or perverse. Castel cannot hold these two images together. María must be entirely truthful or completely false. The real woman, someone who might love, hesitate, lie, fear, desire, and contradict herself has no place within this divide.
Castel also seems unable to recognize the source of his own violence. Suspicion always comes from somewhere outside him. María is the one who confuses him, provokes him, humiliates him, drives him mad. He places in her what he cannot bear to examine in himself, then begins to persecute her as though he were merely defending himself. He puts his monsters inside María and then casts himself as their first victim.
This logic is hardly confined to literature. Some people hurt, control, and intrude upon others while describing every act as an unavoidable response to someone else’s behavior. Responsibility is shifted again and again until it disappears. Aggression becomes self-defense; persecution becomes proof of love; control becomes a need to feel safe.
Castel suffers. That much is clear. The mistake would be to assume that his suffering makes his version of events true or his violence any less serious. Not every kind of pain brings us closer to another person. Some forms of suffering trap us even more deeply inside ourselves. Castel suffers at the thought of losing María, at the humiliation of being deceived, at the prospect of returning to his loneliness. His pain is intense, but it almost always begins and ends with him. Even his guilt remains turned inward.
From a Kleinian perspective, guilt can open the way to what psychoanalysis calls reparation: recognizing that we have harmed someone we love, bearing the weight of that responsibility, and trying to preserve whatever can still be preserved. Castel never reaches that point. He mourns the loss of María without ever fully recognizing her existence apart from him.
Castel does not merely kill a woman. Long before that, he spends much of the novel trying to replace María with the idea he has created of her. When the real woman stubbornly refuses to match the role he has written, he destroys whatever remains.
Loving someone who does not belong to us
Perhaps Castel’s problem is not that he loves too much. That interpretation grants him a kind of romantic grandeur he has not earned. His problem is that he cannot bear María’s existence apart from him.
To love someone is to accept an unwelcome truth: we will never know the person beside us completely. We may share a home, a bed, a life, and a stack of bills, but something will always remain beyond our reach. The other person carries memories we were not there for, thoughts that will never be spoken, desires they may not fully understand themselves, and entire regions of experience that were never meant for us.
Castel treats that distance as an insult. He does not merely want closeness. He wants access. He wants a María with no hidden corners, no past relationships, no ambiguity, and no life beyond the reach of his surveillance. Whatever remains unknown quickly becomes suspicious.
In that sense, The Tunnel still feels strikingly current, perhaps even more than Sábato could have imagined. Today, the fantasy of total transparency comes equipped with highly efficient tools. We can see whether someone is online, how long they took to reply, whom they recently followed, which photo they liked, and where they have been. Technology did not invent jealousy. It simply gave it a command center. And we call this care more often than we should.
Of course, relationships require trust, conversation, and accountability. A vague defense of mystery can also be used to conceal lies and cowardice. Otherness is not a blank check for any kind of behavior. Still, there is a difference between asking for honesty and demanding complete transparency. The first makes a relationship between two people possible. The second tries to reduce two people to a single will.
Castel cannot tolerate the distance between who María is and what he is capable of understanding about her. To him, anything that escapes explanation begins to look like betrayal. His tragedy grows out of that equation.
Otherness begins when we accept that another person is not an extension of ourselves. They may love us and still fail to respond as we hoped. They may remain beside us without handing over every key. They may know parts of our tunnel without abandoning their own path. The opposite of loneliness is not fusion. It is the possibility of meeting someone while remaining two separate people.
By the end of the novel, we still do not know exactly who María Iribarne was. We know her gestures through Castel’s memory, hear her words only after he has selected them, and watch her life through the eyes of the man who killed her. Even her opacity reaches us as an accusation.
This is one of the most violent aspects of Castel’s narrative: after murdering María, he tries to claim the right to explain her. Perhaps our responsibility as readers is not to accept that invitation entirely.
We can understand the tunnel without making a home inside it. We can examine Castel’s fear, jealousy, and loneliness without turning them into mitigating circumstances. And we can return María to the one place he was never able to grant her: the place of a person whose life did not have to fit inside his explanation.
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