The Southern Thruway
by Julio Cortazar
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At a glance:
- Author: Julio Cortazar
- First Published: 1966
- Type of Plot: Fantasy
- Time of Work: About 1966
- Setting: The main highway connecting southern France with Paris
- Characters: An engineer, A young woman, Two nuns, A pale man, A couple, A little girl, Two boys, Two men, A boy, An elderly couple, A farm couple, A soldier, His young wife, A traveling salesperson, An older woman, A fat man, An American tourist, Black-market dealers
- Genres: Short fiction, Fantasy
- Subjects: Values, France or French people, Leadership, Roads, streets, or highways, Survivalism, Technology, Automobiles
- Locales: France, Europe
The Story
“The Southern Thruway” begins with a traffic jam on the main highway back to Paris from southern France, on a summer Sunday afternoon. It seems to be a perfectly ordinary occurrence as cars slow to a crawl, stop, and start up again. The drivers and passengers look irritably at their watches and begin to exchange comments with those in neighboring cars. As the traffic inches along in increasingly infrequent moves forward, the same group of cars stays together and their occupants gradually become acquainted. Although written in the third person, the story focuses on...
(The entire page is 1545 words.)
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