As soon as
I finished reading Aura my mind
immediately jumped to the film, Fight
Club. Aura and Consuelo turn out to be the same person, as do Montero and
General Llorante, which is extremely similar to the merging of the narrator and
Tyler Durden at the end of Fight Club.
Additionally, I felt as if I was Montero/The General because of Fuentes’ use of
the second person in writing this novella. Reading a text that constantly uses
the word “you” is a strange experience. It adds another layer of narration
because Fuentes is telling you, the reader, what is going on in the story, but
the use of the second person in a way makes you tell yourself the story. It is
like he’s telling you what to do and say. The visuals in my head at every point
of the book were like a first person video game. I did not imagine Montero
walking around the house. I imagined myself walking around the housing talking
to Aura and Consuelo. It was to say the
very least, “trippy.” The overall strangeness of the novella made the twist at
the end less shocking. I was not surprised that something supernatural occurred
because of how bizarre the book had been up to that point. The oddity of the
book made the twist more appropriate in the context of the story. Usually films
with twists such as The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, and The Usual Suspects are shrouded in mystery throughout the film and,
in that respect, Aura followed a
similar formula.
I really like the analogy of Fight Club. I think that it applies really well in this situation. To build off of what you said when talking about the book being in second person, it definitely brings you more into the story. In many ways the book is trying to make stories like Fight Club real. It is suggesting that you, as the reader, are following the path of the general, and therefore the book becomes all the more real. It is as if the book is the general's memoirs, and you are Felipe reading them, and becoming him. As if you were the narrator in Fight Club.
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