With the publication of Señas de identidad in 1966, Goytisolo turns his back on the explicitly political approach that had characterized his writing in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This change in the concept of commitment was succinctly summed up by the author himself in an interview when he said:

The quotation is an important one as it confirms all the vital aspects of his mature writing. Goytisolo's commitment is primarily to literature, but the ultimate aim of social improvement remains. The key to understanding the novels of the later period is to see how they try to reconcile their self-consciously literary status with the urge for social transformation. The durability of this idea is seen in a quotation from one of his most recent books of essays, El bosque de las letras, published in 1995, in which he refers to a constant dilemma which he faces as an artist:

Although stressing that in his non-fictional writing, among other things, he can freely denounce injustices and express his political and moral views, while his fictional production is characterized by more personal and specifically literary concerns, there is no clear demarcation between the two facets of Goytisolo's output, the artistic and the political. It can clearly be seen from many of Goytisolo's comments that literature, while limited in its power of direct action, has a privileged position with respect to transforming society, principally via the consciousness of the reader:

Exactly twenty years later, in one of his most recent novels, El sitio de los sitios (1995), the obsession with, on the one hand, the power of literature and, on the other, its limitations is given explicit expression.