Blow- Up

         A01374485

Mónica de la Cruz Rojas

Narrative Point of View:  First person, written from the point of view of the main character, Michel, but he is talking about himself in third person during the narrative.

Plot: The main character, Michel, is telling the story of a experience of him where he took a picture of a couple in the park. The interesting part is how he start to realize what is really going on, which leads to a traumatic climax, where after taking the photo and printing it he realize that he saw a homosexual seduction. The story start with a description of what he does and what he was doing that day, he tells us why he was in the park, and how he tough thing will end between the blond woman and the nervous kid, but as we go along he takes a picture which upsets the woman and generates the kid to run from the situation. He goes home and prints the image, and while a watching it he realizes that it was a homosexual proposal he saw.

Setting:  

1.     Michel’s room in Paris, where he is telling the story.

2.    The park, where he took the picture.

Symbols:

1.     The blow-up, since it is a instrument of revelation of what he saw was in fact something else.

2.    The clouds, they help the reader understand that what he narrates, interrupting the story, is a hallucination, he is remembering.

Conflict: Man vs Man, since Michael is having a more internal war with himself, of watching a homosexual seduction, maybe impaling the character homosexuality and his denial towards it .

What is really interesting about this short story written by Julio Cortaza, was that the reader had to be a detective while reading the story. It was interesting realizing how the main character was becoming a little psychotic after living that experience, taking under account that in the first page he was talking how sure he was of himself and of what he saw, since he has a photographer, he had a great eye and steady pulse. But after the experience in the park, he becomes crazy, saying he shut his eyes to stop watching. It took me a while to understand what was going on, I thought it was a case of  child abuse, since the narrator tells how young the boy was, but as we go on and he starts to describe the scenario with the man, I realize what he really saw. As the reader you have to be really meticulous while reading, to be figuring out what clues are important and the state of the narrator and the reason of it.