Major Issues
Essay Questions

Major Issues

Julio Cortazar is often grouped and studied with other prominent Latin American writers of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes. Reviewers and critics have noted his continued focus on the politics of Latin America, especially Argentina. In Cortazar’s fiction, however, political and social reality is explored by way of fantastic surrealism. His works are often labelled psychological, due to their extreme emphasis on character rather than plot. Both his characters and his plots are usually fragmented. The boundaries between reality and fantasy are shown to be slippery and porous. Cortazar’s radical experimentation with narrative has provided readers and critics with many challenges. His readers must assemble the plot from the narrative collages that he presents. Scholars have observed that the disorienting effects of such unconventional narrative strategies mirror the disorientation frequently experienced by Cortazar’s characters.