Continuity of Parks

One central theme of “Continuity of Parks” is the continuity of worlds, or the relation between reality and what is fiction or imagined. The story invites the reader to reconsider the place of fiction and the imagination in our worlds, demonstrating how one can inform or overlap the other. Worlds collide and different levels of reality interpenetrate. Cortázar also suggests that this transition can happen without one realizing a shift is taking place. Interestingly, the critical moment when the story’s narrative steps away from the reader’s perspective to that of the hero and heroine is combined with the reader’s experience of the story: “He was witness to the final encounter in the mountain cabin. The woman arrived first, apprehensive; now the lover came in, his face cut by the backlash of a branch” (64). There is no clear break or exit from the reader-protagonist as Cortázar transfers the focus on the characters of the novel. This continuity of worlds occurs again at the story’s conclusion with a fantastic, uncanny scene in which a character from a novel being read by the