The vast amount of published narratives on the last decade in Mexico, linked to an unnerving social climate produced by drug trafficking and corruption, is highly noticeable. In response to these sociopolitical conditions, it seems to me that the stories that don't approach violence directly should be questioned. Here I pose that oblique writing is a form of resisting the possibility that violence is being nurtured from language. In this article I focus on "Ptosis", one of the short stories in Pétalos y otras historias incómodas (2008) by Guadalupe Nettel. Appealing to the theoretical approaches of Ariel Dorfman, Amartya Sen, Arjun Appadurai, Walter Benjamin, and Roland Barthes, and others, I aim to reflect on the nature of identities and their survival methods, in the midst of a violence social context.
