Reivindicación del conde don Julián, published in 1970, is the second instalment of the Mendiola Trilogy and is certainly a much more fully rounded and accomplished novel than Señas de identidad. The transitional phase of the earlier novel has largely been overcome and the author now pursues his new aesthetic with greater confidence and sense of purpose. It is a multifaceted work which can be read in a variety of ways. Goytisolo himself has commented:

As with Señas, critics have tended to see the novel in a dual light as portraying the personal crisis of the central protagonist, his sense of alienation, inner crisis, his status as an exile from Spain and his rebellious nature, and at the same time, emphasizing its own break with the traditional novel and its upsetting of conventional linguistic and narrative usages. In the majority of cases, these two aspects are drawn together in an ‘expressive’ function: the narrative experimentation is seen to ‘reflect’, to ‘express’ in novelistic, aesthetic terms the human crisis portrayed by the novel. In many cases, the novel is read even more literally as an expression of the problems of the real author Goytisolo.

The formal elements in Don Julián are interpreted, as with Señas, in terms of reflecting the protagonist's, and Spain's, reality. The novel's satiric and parodic attack on the literary tradition of Spain can be accounted for by the protagonist's exiled status as someone who is outside the country and, as Goytisolo himself said, ‘ha renunciado a la realidad física de su país, pero no a su cultura; a la tierra, pero no a la palabra’. It is a continuation of the end of Señas where Alvaro recognized that the only thing linking him to Spain was language. It is against language that the attack must be carried out.

In spite of the interrelationship between the levels of form and content, there is an important extent to which they conflict with one another and produce narrative dislocations which the reader must, in turn, naturalize. Such features emerge from a consideration of the way Don Julián develops the metafictional mode that we had noticed emerging in the previous novel.