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Night Face Up Theme

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Dreams can feel so real sometimes that you question whether or not it really happened. This is the case with the story The Night Face Up by Julio Cortazar, as the protagonist experiences a series of dreams that feel so real he questions what is real and what isn’t. Likewise the theme of this story is Dreams can feel like reality because his dreams are very vivid, he smells things in his dream, and he dreams of being an Aztec sacrifice that he thinks are real. In all actuality these dreams are just a result of a fever due to a motorcycle crash and subsequent injuries. …show more content…

In the beginning the unnamed protagonist crashes his motorcycle since there was a lady in front of him he nearly hit. He is put in the hospital due to the injuries he suffered, he broke some of his bones and is bruised. To help with those injuries he is given medications, and due to the combination of a fever and the medication he starts having fever dreams. In these dreams he is an Aztec who being hunted by soldiers since he is an escaped sacrifice. One of the reasons the theme is dreams can feel like reality because he smells things very vividly. “It was unusual as a dream because it was full of smells, and he never dreamt smells. First a marshy smell, there to the left of the swamps that began already, the quaking bogs from which no one ever returned”-. This quote shows the how real the dream feels, as he states how he never smells in his dream …show more content…

Towards the end of the story the protagonist is in the Aztec plot and is captured by the other Aztecs and restrained by rope. He is being sacrificed because the Aztecs sacrificed people to appease their gods. He was trying to escape this fate but failed and ended up being captured anyway. The final part of the story is about him about to be sacrificed with an Aztec sacrificial knife by an executioner-priest. The protagonist then says something that makes it really seem like the true plot has been the Aztec one all along. “he was awake, that the marvelous dream had been the other, absurd as all dreams are-a dream in which he was going through the strange avenues of an astonishing city, with green and red lights that burned without fire or smoke, on an enormous metal insect that whirred away between his legs”. This one quote make it look like the Aztec storyline in the real one as he states it himself “he was awake” so the story about him crashing his motorcycle was all a dream and he was about to die. Of course the hospital storyline was the real one as the combination of a fever and medication induced this very realistic dream sequence of being an Aztec sacrifice. Also there is no way an Aztec; someone from around 600 years ago could predict the future so

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