Continuity of Parks

Challenging conventional ways of reading fiction, “Continuity of Parks” uses a frame narrative device to tell the tale of a man whose murder is being plotted by the protagonists of the novel he is reading.

Cortázar’s story introduces a metaphysical twist on the frame narrative, or a story within a story, structure that collapses the distinction between the two narratives and allows them to communicate with one another. The title, “Continuity of Parks,” refers literally to this overlap, the continuity between the park in which the reader-protagonist’s house sits and the park across which the assassin “hero” of the novel comes to kill that reader. By extension, the title also refers to the continuity between the two levels of experience in the story, thus a Continuity of Worlds.

While Cortázar’s story centers on the interpenetrative continuity of these two worlds, it also establishes their different atmospheres. The story contrasts the two “worlds” or narrative levels, that of the reader-protagonist in his study and that of the adulterous couple in the mountain cabin. The scene of the