Week 2: "Continuity of Parks," Julio Cortazar

The Cortazar piece played with the concept of author, narrator, and character. He gives the reader a description of the first character, with no indication that this character may be the narrator as well. It is not until the second to last sentence on the first page that the reader gets the ‘novel’s language’; “the woman arrived first, apprehensive . . .” This line introduces the character’s in the novel that the first character is reading. The first thought that I got was that he was extremely into the story and thus, the narrator, stopped describing the first character—that could possibly be himself—and started writing about his second and third character, whom are the couple in the novel. Once the narrator began to describe the couple’s actions, I figured that that was the end of the first characters part in this piece. What brought me back to the first character, and/or narrator, was the last line. Cortazar waited until the last line of the reading to surprise his audience with a circular plot, and then ends it. The way in which his descriptions give little clue to the overall piece made me want to read more; and his descriptions allowed a somewhat movie-feel to the reading. The way in which he moved the reader through the story was as if these were all scenes to a mystery film that had no real ending, just mystery.