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What Does The Night Face Up Mean

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Marine POYLO - SPAN B 312 – Latin American Literature in Translation Response Paper 1 - “The Night Face Up”, Julio Cortazar (1967)

Am I dreaming? There is no doubt that this expression of everyday life connoting surprise can also be a deep question that one already wondered more than once. Who has never never woken up in the morning wondering if what happened on the day before – be it good or bad news – was part of a dream or in fact a true reality? It is this blurred boundary between the real and the dreamt world that the Argentinian writer Julio Cortazar explores in his short story “The Night Face Up” (1967) where he describes the story of a motorcyclist hospitalized after an accident and dreaming of a flight from the Aztecs. The extremely detailed description of the atmosphere and the juxtaposition of the dreamt and real words are the two points that caught my attention in Cortazar’s short story. …show more content…

66) coupled with a certainly voluntary non description of the protagonist (“he did not have a name”, p. 66) enable the reader to picture the situation from the beginning. Likewise, the description of the Aztecs world is very detailed (“his feet sank into a bed of leaves”, p. 71), which makes the reader living the dream and even forgetting which world is real. This is emphasized by constant juxtaposition in the description of the two worlds (e.g. “He managed to cut the air once or twice” (…) “It’s the fever” the man on the next bed said.” p. 72). The calm tone adopted by the author to describe the hospital room contrasts with the rapid tone chosen to describe the Aztecs world and demonstrate that the protagonist finds reality reassuring. Finally, the reaction of the protagonist’s senses to the dream (e.g. “a marshy smell”, p. 69) reveals how the body reacts to unconscious thoughts and highlights once again this blurred boarder between dream and

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