The Night Face Up
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"La noche boca arriba" (English: The Night Face Up) is a short story by Julio Cortázar anthologized in Final del juego (1956).
Plot
"The Night Face Up" is a very short story that has an interesting twist. It is about a young man in a city who, while leaving a hotel, has a motorcycle accident because he wants to avoid a collision with a woman and is taken to the hospital. While on the stretcher, every so often he falls asleep and while he sleeps he dreams that he is in the jungle of Mexico during the Flower wars fleeing from the Aztecs who want to trap him to sacrifice him. After several dreams, in one of them he discovers that he is already a prisoner of the Aztecs and that he is about to be sacrificed. At that moment he desperately wants to wake up and return to the hospital room. In the end, he discovers that the real dream is that of the motorcycle accident and the hospital and that the reality is that he is going to be sacrificed in the jungle of Mexico by the Aztecs. The main character is the young man who suffers a motorcycle accident and is taken to a hospital. On the other hand he is also a young man who is about to be killed for a sacrifice.
It takes place in Mexico since the main character is a Moteca Indian.
The story takes place during the Flower wars waged by the Aztecs, during the centuries prior to the Conquest of America. In this war, instead of killing their enemies in battle, the objective was to capture them and take them alive to their capital, where the priests sacrificed them on top of one of their pyramids, placed them on a stone "face up" and removed their hearts with a stone dagger. It was customary for the Aztecs to provide prisoners for sacrifices to their gods.
There is a confusion between dream and reality. The fantastic resides in the fact that the character dreams of realities he does not know, of a remote future. A strange, unusual element breaks into everyday reality and produces a different world, whose strange phenomena confront the reader with the problematic reality/irreality. It seeks to produce a feeling of uncertainty and hesitation in the reader, who hesitates between a rational explanation.
