The Night Face Up is a short story written by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, first published in 1956 as part of his collection “Bestiario” (Bestiary). The story blends elements of realism, fantasy, and surrealism, characteristic of Cortázar’s writing style. It alternates between two worlds centuries apart; the present day where the protagonist is recovering from a motorcycle accident, and the Aztec empire where he is escaping a hunt. It explores themes of reality, dreams, identity, and the blurred boundaries between the conscious and unconscious mind.
The Night Face Up | Summary
The story begins with the unnamed narrator hurrying to get his motorcycle out. He is relaxing with the air between his legs and the freedom accorded to him because of the bike. Suddenly, a woman walks across the crosswalk and while he is able to slow his speed down, the bike topples over him and he knocks out cold.
As he feels the taste of blood, a few young men hold him and within five minutes, the police ambulance arrives. He gives his information to the officer riding in the ambulance with him. As his nausea comes back, he is pushed on a wheelchair stretcher and he wishes he was chloroformed. He is pushed into surgery twenty minutes later.
As the man starts dreaming, he notices that the dream is full of smells, which is strange. He finds himself being hunted and almost immediately knows that he is being hunted by the Aztecs. He also knows that he belongs to the Moteca tribe. The dream “smells of war” and he knows that if he stays on the trail, he will make it through the war of blossom. Almost immediately, a patient next to him tells him to stop moving or he will fall off the bed.
Awake now, he finds himself in a hospital ward where his arm in a plaster cast is suspended with weights and pulleys. As if he had been running, he feels thirsty, but no one gives him water. A nurse gave him an injection, and a young intern came to check something. He is served a broth and notes that it will probably not be hard for him to sleep since his arm is hardly hurting. As he drifts off, he starts dreaming again.
He realizes that he is running in “pitch darkness” and he has gotten off the trail that he was supposed to be on. He is unable to find it now; he touches his amulet and mumbles prayers to the goddess. He notes that the war of the blossom had been going on for three days and three nights and the hunt would continue until “the priests gave a sign to return”.
With a knife in hand, he notes the pleasure he felt in stabbing the man who was attacking him. The man in the next bed says that because of the fever, he had been having lucid dreams and flailing his arms. The protagonist does not want to think about the nightmare, and as his face feels cool, he thinks his fever is gone. He tries thinking about the moment of the accident and realizes that there is a void at the moment between his falling on the pavement and being brought to the hospital; it feels like an entire eternity has passed in this void.
As he dreams again, he opens his eyes and looks around, trying to touch his amulet with his chin. He realizes he has been stripped of it. He is in a dungeon, and he hears “kettledrums of the feast”. He was in the underground of the temple and was awaiting his turn.
As he thinks about his inevitable end, he yells. He fights to rid himself of the chords that have been holding him and frightfully thinks of his friends who had been sacrificed or were awaiting sacrifice. He finds himself being led up a staircase, at the end of which stood the priest. He struggles to come back to the hospital, but at some point, he feels the switch. He suddenly realizes that he had been awake after all, and the “marvelous dream had been the other”. He is finally executed in the Aztec temple.
The Night Face Up | Analysis
Julio Cortazar has weaved a story in which a reader spends as much time in one space as the other, blurring the line between dreams and reality. A reader is told that after the accident, the dream he sees is full of smells, while one cannot ‘smell’ as such in dreams. Cortazar uses his signature style of “the switch”; the switch in the story is not between the literary and the real, but instead, time-lapse centuries apart.
As Cortazar describes the switch, he uses strange, unfamiliar vocabulary to suggest that what had been real so far was the dream. The motorcycle becomes “an enormous metal insect that whirred away between his legs” and traffic lights become “lights that burned without fire or smoke.” The protagonist himself is as frustrated as the reader is expected to be. As he tries contemplating on the moment of the accident which would have had answers to the “switch”, he realizes that there is a void and in that void, eternities have passed. The story’s structure, with alternating scenes in the modern hospital and the ancient Aztec world, creates a sense of disorientation, making it difficult for the reader to determine which world is the actual reality. This ambiguity raises questions about the nature of consciousness and the fluidity of identity.
Towards the end of the story, the story is less about what is a dream and what is real but rather blurs the lines between the two. Indeed, a reader is completely unaware of the protagonist and his background; if we are to consider him riding a motorcycle a dream sequence, then the dream begins in media res while his alternate self in the Aztec world has some background to his character- that he belongs to the Moteca tribe. The void he notices is anything beyond what is provided to a reader by Cortazar.
The Night Face Up | Character Sketch
The Unnamed Protagonist
The protagonist is a fascinating character; he is at once riding a motorcycle in the present day and a Moteca prisoner of the past. His alternate selves are separated by centuries. His emotional state fluctuates between confusion, fear, and determination. In the hospital scenes, he is disoriented and sometimes delirious as he drifts between consciousness and unconsciousness. In the Aztec dream world, he becomes a young Aztec warrior, experiencing intense emotions of fear, anxiety, and a strong desire to escape his pursuers.
In “The Night Face Up,” Julio Cortázar masterfully blurs the boundaries between reality and dream, past and present, challenging conventional notions of identity and time. The protagonist’s identity is split between his modern-day persona and his Aztec warrior self. The story’s enigmatic nature encourages readers to reflect on the interconnectedness of human experiences and the complexity of our perception of the world.
