Niebla by Miguel de Unamuno: from Novela to Nivola

This paper analyses Miguel de Unamuno’s Niebla (1914) as a deliberate break with the conventions of the realist novel, a break signalled by the author’s own generic label, nivola. Focusing on narrative minimalism, dialogic construction and the text’s self-reflexive strategies, the article argues that Niebla turns the “story” into a laboratory for ontological inquiry: identity is staged as a process, freedom is tested against authorial determinism, and the reader is pushed into the role of co-creator of meaning. The study highlights the novel’s metafictional climax – the encounter between Augusto Pérez and the author – and reads the title’s recurrent motif (“mist”) as a multi-layered metaphor: everyday opacity, epistemic uncertainty, and the blurred boundary between fiction and reality. By placing creator, character and reader in a dynamic hierarchy of existence, Unamuno anticipates key concerns of twentieth-century modernist and postmodern narrative theory.