Light/Dark

One of the most prominent motifs in Aura is that of light/dark. Light typically represents knowledge, clarity, goodness, happiness, life, and truth, but in this text light is often filtered, fleeting, broken up, scattered or blinding to create a sense of illusion. Only certain aspects of the picture are illuminated, and so the whole image becomes distorted. Light can also be manipulated to cause someone to see things that aren't there and create optical illusions. Carlos Fuentes has taken a typically friendly symbol and used it to give the text a more mysterious and sinister feel.

Most of Aura is set in partial or total darkness. Consuelo prefers to keep her house in constant darkness, which creates the impression that something or someone could be hiding. Consuelo herself seems to be hiding, because she does not want Felipe to see that Aura is just an illusion of youth that she projects, that she and Aura are one and the same which means that the woman he loves is ancient and skeletal. Felipe's true identity as General LLorente also hides, until he hold a picture of the general up to the light and discovers the truth. In darkness there is no clear distinction between one thing and another. The past blends with the present, youth blends with age, a rabbit blends into a girl, identities and realities blend with each other. When Felipe first meets Aura he describes her as being "afraid of the light" (27). This could be because the light reveals that Aura is not who she wants Felipe to think she is.