Blowup Analysis

BLOW UP ANALYSIS

Blow up is a short story written by Julio Cortazar, an Argentinian writer that wrote around the 1960’s. It talks about a guy named Michel who is from Chile but lives in Paris working as a translator. He enjoys a lot of activities there, but the most relevant to him is photography, his favorite activity ever. Throughout the story, Michel is explaining one of his experiences taking a picture and how this changed his way of perceiving things.

The actual theme of this short story talks about perspective. We get this since the beginning, with different point of views from Cortazar. This makes the story so much more difficult for us to understand it, but is a useful strategy regarding his objective, to reveal us the importance of seeing, without showing indifference towards any detail. The narrator of the story Cortazar uses are two: first person when Michel is telling the story directly and third person when he’s not dong it directly. By showing us two different kind of narrators, Cortazar kind of confuses us, but doing it in purpose. The effect this has on the crowd, on the readers, is that he makes us think Michel is completely or at least a bit crazy, something that is confirmed by the end of the story.

The plot of this consists on Michel trying to tell us a traumatic experience he lived in the park due to his love of taking photographs. First, he goes to the park, where he sees a couple, so he takes a picture of them thinking it would be a good idea. After a few minutes he realized it wasn’t a normal couple. It was a kid the one that almost kissed the woman. That little guy felt nervous due to the photograph and ran out, so nothing happened. Through the development of the story, Michel gets a lot of more information which traumatized him by the end of this short story,

Talking about the setting, we could localize ourselves first in Michel’s room, where he’s reflexing about this weird experience. But there’s like a secondary setting as important as Michel’s room, the park. Here’s where all the action of the story (photograph) takes place.

We can find a lot of symbols hidden in Cortazar’s writing, but one of the most easily seen in this work of his is the blowup. The blowup means for Cortazar a trigger that alouds is to see the whole picture of events that can be seen with more than one perspective.