Self-evidently, the defining characteristic of the narrative of the office is that it focuses on a broad middle sector of society: one for which literacy and numeracy are the essential skills in earning a living. Indeed, the smooth running of the entire social and economic machinery depends on this group: on their practical skills, and on their acceptance of what is frequently a tedious routine, within societies which, political rhetoric apart, often do not appear to be constructed with their interests in mind.

The writers we have considered in this study have in different ways problematised a paradoxical condition, in which the individual is on the one hand required to think rationally in certain contexts, and on the other is denied autonomy, and may be required – even coerced – into accepting what is unjust or absurd, or against their interest or beliefs. In the context of such interests and beliefs, the literature of the office has been generated, not from either social extreme, but from within this crucial middle social sector; the writers we have studied have problematised the bureaucratic condition as a result of direct experience.

Before we proceed to our conclusion, there are some important general observations to make. First and foremost, in the River Plate literature of the office, the bureaucratic mentality and condition is generally viewed as unsatisfactory:1 at best office life is presented as tedious, unfulfilling routine; at worst it represents a complete abdication of humanity, in which a clerk can regard the sending of a citizen to illegal torture and death as a bureaucratic ‘transaction’.

At either extreme, the bureaucratic mentality and condition are presented as inherently in conflict with autonomy and creativity. Through the decades, the writers of the office address this central dilemma in different ways – both in relation to their own lives, and to their writing about society. However, the end-point is always the same: from within, which is to say focalising through a more or less realistically portrayed white-collar worker – the paradigmatic social type, and the literature's intended readership – there appears to be no satisfactory way of simultaneously representing both the bureaucratic mentality and experience, and constructing a convincing, and above all positive critique. Certainly there are cogent critiques, but they are invariably negative and unlikely to inspire confidence in the reader.