Blow-up Analysis

Diego Alejandro Cabrera Zúñiga. A01375114.

Blow-up

Analysis

Introduction and POV

Blow-up is a short story written by Julio Cortazar. This story presents wide-complex themes and the way the narrator tells the story may confuse the reader. Michel is a photographer in Paris that tries to take a good picture at a perfect moment. The story is told at the same time by the First Person Narrator, Michel, and Michel talking about himself in the Third Person Point of View. So Michel tells the story in two different ways, but the first person narration predominates along the story.

PLOT

Intoduction: Michel is introduced as a fashion photographer, who is in charge of taking photographs that reflect everyday situations to illustrate books. 

Rising Action: he recounts the events of his Sunday morning stroll along the Seine. He was in a good mood as he catches an interesting scene in which a blond woman seems to be attempting to seduce a teenage boy. Michel watches the scene carefully and began to imagine the whole situation, details that he attempts to divine from his room. 

Climax: He finally took the photo of them and his action is noticed by both the woman and the boy. The woman irritated demands the film. Meanwhile, the boy escaped from the scene. 

Falling Action: Michel understands the overall situation of the scene thanks to the blow-up onto the wall and thinks it was a homosexual seduction and he is terrified of the man´s role parked near the scene. 

Resolution: Michel rejects what he saw and projected the pigeons and clouds that he saw at the park in that morning as the result of his traumatic experience .  

SETTING

The story takes place in Michel's room in Paris in the 20th century, where he is looking at the blow-up on the wall as he's writing the story of his experience on a typewriter. The time is in the present. The secondary setting is the park area when Michel took the photograph of the woman and the boy. The time is in the past, during a Sunday Nov. 7 about a month before the present time of the telling.

CHARACTERS

Michel is the main character, he is actually a dynamic character. The blonde, the boy and the man are secondary characters. Michel is passing through a traumatic process after taking the photo in the park. He was first quite confident with himself and then he became traumatized, when he no longer sees the boy and the woman in the photo, but clouds and birds passing by in the film.

SYMBOLS

One of the symbols found in the story are the:

• Clouds and pigeons: They were part of his hallucinations because he related when he saw them at the park in the morning with what he sees in the film projected onto the blow-up as something natural and innocent.
• The blonde and the man who was parked: Both represent the devil or evilness by whom the boy escaped from, but Michel didn´t, due to he escapes his hallucination by shutting his eyes as the man comes so close that he filled his camera lens.
• The blow-up: Is a symbol because it revealed Michel´s hallucinations and the truth of the scene. 

LANGUAGE

The language used in the story is confusive, descriptive, complex and in some way creepy. Also, the information is repetitive and some phrases are out of context. Poetic language is present as well, a number of graceful phrases about the meaning of taking photographs conforms the poetic sentences.

THEMES

1. Confidence and Rejection: At the beginning of the story, Michel has great confidence of observation, his ability to see and understand what he sees causes him to take the picture. However, his traumatic projection overwhelmed him and causes him to reject the sight of the scene that was something that he didn't want to see.
2. Perspective in which we see the things or the Different Points of Views: In the park he thinks that the woman was seducing a boy, but later when he looks carefully at the blow-up of the incident, he sees that he had completely misunderstood what was going on.
3. Acceptance of Reality, because Michel completely eliminated the contents of the photo from his mind and projected clean peaceful scenes from nature onto the blow-up, since the issue of seeing a homosexual seduction is so traumatic for him.

Cortazar is very mysterious in this reading. I guess that the purpose of reading blow-up is just to get the idea of photographers’ job in understanding what they see and the background story of the scene they´re shooting to. As the scene of this novel turned out to be something traumatic to Michel, he started to face a mental breakdown and the way he handled it represents that not all photographers find what they´re looking for when they take photos.