Young Sánchez de Ignacio Aldecoa vs Young Serra de Manuel Vázquez Montalbán: dos derrotados sobre el ring de la historia

The article compares the protagonist of Ignacio Aldecoa’s short story “Young Sánchez” (1957) with the character of Young Serra, created by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán as a tribute to the writer from Vitoria. Serra appears in the novel El pianista (1985) and in the Carvalho’s short story “Desde los tejados”, included in the collection Historias de padres e hijos (1987). Both Aldecoa and Vázquez Montalbán portray their respective boxers as symbols of the working class fighting to break the silence and the marginalisation imposed by history. However, neither of them will succeed because if in El pianista the Young Serra character appears as an almost perfect double of Young Sánchez, in “Desde lo tejados” he is presented as a kind of future projection of the former, defeated by fate and death.