The focus of the master's thesis is the storytelling of two twentieth-century writers, Silvina Ocampo and Tommaso Landolfi. Both share a common fantastic genre, which comprises the majority of their oeuvre. They share the element of uncertainty, which is the central subject of this thesis, but each constructs it in their own way, as the analysis of the selected tales shows. Landolfi's fantastic tales are close to the classical ones, in which the clash between the real and the unreal world is evident. The narrator and the protagonist are stunned and bewildered when a supernatural element enters their reality. They hesitate and wonder whether the supernatural event they are witnessing is real or just a figment of their imagination, but they do not find the answer until the end. Sometimes some tales end without a denouement because the narrator refuses to reveal it or because he does not even know it himself. Thus the reader, together with the protagonist and the narrator, is left with unanswered questions at the end of the tale.
In Ocampo's tales, we do not encounter a collision between opposing worlds, as reality and unreality merged. The supernatural element subtly enters into reality and does not cause bewilderment in the protagonist and the narrator. They do not wonder about the unusual and inexplicable phenomenon, because for them it is simply part of reality. Ocampo does not use magical and supernatural elements in order to unsettle the reader, but rather something unusual that comes from the upside-down everyday life. Moreover, what disturbs the reader even more is that strange and grotesque phenomena are something quite normal for literary figures. In this way, Ocampo sheds light on what society hides and represses, which is the main purpose of her tales, and require the reader's metaphorical interpretation. Ocampo constructs uncertainty through incomprehensible and contradictory sentences, through nonsense, or through abrupt endings to tales that do not unsettle the literary figures, which is why the uncertainty in Silvina's tales is less obvious than in Landolfi's.
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