 Literary scholar Gabriele Eckart gives as an excellent example of Asturias's surrealist style his portrayal of The Zany's psychic processes in which "language sometimes breaks apart into incomprehensible sounds".This allows Asturias to present the real and imaginary, as well as the communicable and incommunicable, as non-contradictory.Himelblau also highlights how projects "reality in relative, fluid terms—that is it allows its characters to disclose the temporal setting of the novel's fictional events".