"Discurso, identidad nacional y literatura en Edgardo Rodriguez Julia" is a study on Puerto Rican national identity and its historical literary discourse. The works of this Caribbean author depict not only the cultural, political and economic woes of the island, but also the manipulation of those dilemmas by the colonial powers-that-be in Puerto Rico. If one takes those issues into account, then Edgardo Rodriguez Julia's literary production is the most integral and comprehensive contribution to Puerto Rican literature. His writings rescue the image of national identity in a novel and liberating manner. Today, the author's works constitute a primary source of information that can help one understand the cultural and political process in Puerto Rico as it relates to the Latin American Caribbean. The aesthetic values of his chronicles and novels, as well as the analytical format of this writer's essays are original in that they display style, a critical aperture and new images concerning national identity. The author's narrative exhibits a vast, knowledgeable assimilation of diverse cultural discourse and an acute awareness of the complex historical search for nationality. The writer unveils more ways to answer the island's perennial historical inquiry by stating in his own words: "I only want to understand who we (Puerto Ricans) are and how we live. Most of all, why we are the way we are." The dissertation is divided into four chapters and a general bibliography. Chapter I, Historiografia y literatura: mitologizacion de la nacionalidad puertorriquena, reviews the image of the "great Puerto Rican family" as discursive expression derived from the dominant social class which excludes African and Indigenous ethnicity. Chapter II, Las cronicas de Edgardo Rodriguez Julia en la literatura puertorriquena, analyzes the images referring to nationality, women and family as symbols by considering the literary tradition and the social processes from where they originate. Chapter III, El gesto "parejero" y liberador, is an overview of the literary and ideological relations between Rodriguez Julia and the generation of writers from the 1930's. This chapter compares the literary dialogue from Antonio S. Pedreira's work entitled Insularismo with Rodriguez Julia's chronicles. Chapter IV, Dos posesas (escritura e historia) is an in-depth study of Rodriguez Julia's novels: La renuncia del heroe Baltasar (1974); La noche oscura del Nino Aviles (1984); El camino de Yyaloide (1994) and Cartagena (1997). In all of these works, the author inserts American ontology within the universal realm so as to understand violence and its ontological origins in the Americas. This has been a result of European philosophical development dating back to the Renaissance era that justified its dominance in the political arena throughout Latin America. The novel Cartagena continues the ontological search, but it differs in that the work links the political and colonial with the social psychological nature of its characters' portrayals. This study incorporates the critical methodologies of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau and Jean de Chesneaux, among others, due to their contributions in the fields of historiography and mythology.