29 pages • 58 minutes read
Julio CortázarContinuity of Parks
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1964A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Reader-Protagonist
The unnamed protagonist in “Continuity of Parks” is a minimally developed, passive character whose key role is that of a reader of fiction. The story opens with him taking care of practical affairs connected to his estate; once these are cleared away, he returns to his reading. The business he attends to seems like an interruption of his true calling: leisure.
A seemingly well-to-do estate owner, he savors his secluded and comfortable life. He is a conventional, privileged, and leisured representative of the status quo. He embodies the traditional, passive kind of reader that Cortázar’s story criticizes. This protagonist wants nothing more than to immerse himself, to “lose” himself in his reading. He reads for escape, entertainment, and vicarious thrills. Reading, for him, is a slightly titillating amusement, an “almost perverse pleasure” (63). In the safety of his estate, he can indulge in the thrills of criminal passion in ways that do not compromise but instead enhance the comfort and ease of his privileged life.
Apart from a brief interaction with an estate manager, the protagonist is presented alone in his act of reading, until the final sentence of the story. He relishes his solitude. While the ending of “Continuity of Parks” tantalizes with its supposition that the reader-protagonist is about to be killed by his wife’s lover, up to this point there has been no indication in the narrative that he has a wife. She never crosses his mind.
The reader-protagonist seems to lack for nothing. He appears perfectly content and self-satisfied. He also appears quite certain of his safety, placing his back to the door as he settles into his favorite armchair to begin his reading. He never registers a desire for company. He lives almost thoughtlessly in a world of effortless leisure and comfort.
“Hero” of the Novel
The “hero” of the novel the protagonist is reading becomes his murderous antagonist. In the second episode of Cortázar’s narrative, “the hero and heroine” confirm their murder plot in a cabin in the mountains. The identification of this adulterous couple reviewing their “sordid” plan as a “hero” and “heroine” ironically parodies the romantic pretensions of the novel.
Within the frame of Cortázar’s story, these two function as stock characters out of a steamy, popular novel. They also conform to traditional gender roles. Although both are complicit in planning the murder of the estate owner, as the male figure, the “hero” takes charge of its execution. He is an active character fully focused on the task at hand.
His determination, dynamism, and drive contrast with the more passive, sedate, solitary reader-protagonist. The hero assassin is active, sensuous, and embodied, fully caught up not in a text but with his lover. He is passionate and violent. He enters the scene with a bloody cut on his face, and his murder weapon warms against his beating heart: “the dagger warmed itself against his chest, and underneath liberty pounded, hidden close” (64). His conversation with the woman is wild, animated, and contained with irresistible passion: “A lustful, panting dialogue raced down the pages like a rivulet of snakes, and one felt it has all been decided from eternity” (64). Unlike the protagonist, who has nothing to do besides read his book, the hero of the novel is filled with a sense of urgency as he works to enact his murderous plan. Leaving the cabin, he rushes along the mountain path all the way to the estate and hurries down the oak-lined avenue to enter the house and kill his sedentary victim.
“Heroine” of the Novel
Equally complicit with her lover in the murder of her husband, the “heroine” of the novel is passionately affectionate and physical. Like her “hero” counterpart, she is embodied, dynamic, and breathlessly fervent. When her lover enters with a cut on his face, the woman “stanched the blood with kisses” (64). Perhaps having second thoughts about the murder, her caresses “writhed about the lover’s body, as though wishing to keep him there, to dissuade him from it” (64). Conforming to standard romantic tropes, she expresses the stronger moral sense, or the softer heart, which is conventionally understood as feminine.
However, although the woman first appears “apprehensive” and seems to signal that she has second thoughts about the murder, these glimmers of moral consciousness are ultimately extinguished (64). At the close of their conversation, she has become as determined as her lover to go through with the crime. Leaving the cabin, both are “rigidly fixed upon the task which awaited them” (64).
It is revealed that she lives with the reader-protagonist as his wife on the estate through the information she has given her lover about the manager and guard dogs, and about the layout of the house: “The woman’s words reached him over the thudding of blood in his ears: first a blue chamber, then a hall, then a carpeted stairway” (65). Although her lover wields the knife, because she is fatally betraying her spouse, the “heroine’s” guilt is perhaps the heavier.
