Short Story Criticism | Cortázar, Julio - José Sanjinés (essay date fall-winter 1994)

José Sanjinés (essay date fall-winter 1994)

SOURCE: Sanjinés, José. “‘Blow-Up’: A House with Many Stories.” Point of Contact 4, no. 1 (fall-winter 1994): 46-55.

[In the following essay, Sanjinés analyzes the narrative framework of “Blow-Up,” asserting that the story “is constructed on the principle of Chinese boxes.”]

I. ALL THE FRAMES OF THE FRAME

One of Cortázar's best-known short stories, “Blow-Up,” is constructed on the principle of Chinese boxes. The text consists of a series of stories interpolated one within the other; each new story in the syntagmatic disposition signals a new hierarchical level and opens a new internal frame. Although the agile narrative transitions veil many of these borders and generate in the reader a sometimes disorienting illusion of continuity, the main internal frames of the story can be described with relative precision.

The first frame occupies more or less the...

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