“The Night Face Up” and “House Taken Over” by Julio Cortázar have strange events that couldn’t happen in real life. In “The Night Face Up” most of the story is a dream, whereas in “House Taken Over” invisible people go inside the house and take it over. However, in both stories the characters are controlled by a magical force that doesn’t give them different choices to solve the problem in the story. This magical force is what decides what they should do and forces them to do it. What Cortázar means to say in both stories is that humans don’t have free will; they think that they can do what they decide to do, but really some magical force controls their lives.
In both stories Cortázar doesn’t give names to any characters. For example in the story “The Night Face Up” he simply uses the pronoun “he” when he describes the accident with “He braked hard with foot and hand, wrenching himself to the left; he heard the woman scream, and at the collision his vision went.” By doing that Cortázar transmits the idea that the main character can be any person, which it can happen to anyone. Similarly in “House Taken Over” he just says the name of the main character’s sister when he writes “I missed my briar pipe, and Irene, I think, regretted the loss of an ancient bottle of Hesperidin’s…”. By not giving a name to the main character also in this story Cortázar creates suspense in the story because in the house are invisible forces and he also transmit that the main character can be anyone.
In addition both stories have strange events which are connected to a magical force; the main problem is that this magical force causes difficulties in the lives of the main characters and don’t let them have a “happy end”. In “The Night Face Up” this magical force controls what will happen to the main character during his dream as Cortázar describes, “It was unusual as a dream because it was full of smells, and he never dreamt smells… there to the left of the trail the swamps began already, the quaking bogs from which no one ever returned.” While the character is in the dream, he is struggling to escape from the place in his dream. In “House Taken Over” the magical force controls the characters’ lives in a different way. It controls them through noises caused by invisible people as the story describes, “The sound came through muted and indistinct, a chair being knocked over onto the carpet or the muffled buzzing of a conversation.” Even though they try to do everything well and keep their house, this magical force is so powerful that they need to abandon their house.
Although the stories are very similar, they differ in that “The Night Face Up” is mostly dreams and “House Taken Over” is built around normal events. “The Night Face Up” starts with normal events as the author describes the main character, “Halfway down the long hotel vestibule, he thought that probably he was going to be late, and hurried on into the street to get out his motorcycle… he heard the woman scream, and at the collision his vision went.” After the accident he ends up in the hospital and begins his dream where he is trying to escape from the Aztecs. In this story the main character is confuse about what is real and what is the dream which further confuses the reader. In contrast, in the story “House Taken Over” both the characters and the reader are sure about what is real and what is not real. Most of the story has normal events focusing on what happen inside the house, as the author wrote, “We rose at seven in the morning and got the cleaning done, and about eleven I left Irene to finish off whatever rooms and went to the kitchen.” The author describes a normal day in the life of a brother and a sister that doesn’t give any foreshadowing of the invisible people inside the house. This makes “The Night Face Up” different to “House Taken Over”.
Both stories share the aspect that the characters can’t make their own decision and maybe someone or something that we can call magical force already “wrote” the path of their lives and they follow it without noticing that or realizing that it was impossible to change what happened. After everything we can imagine or believe that we as humans are controlled by a magical force instead of having the satisfactory free will that gives us the right to do whatever we want whenever we want and however we want.
By Luiza Leal
Teixeira de Melo
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