“Blow-Up” Homework Assignment

Reality vs. Imagination

Examples:

“It’s going to be difficult because nobody really knows… if I am I or what actually occurred or what I’m seeing…or if, simply, I’m telling a truth which is only my truth and then is the truth only for my stomach, for this impulse to go running out and to finish up in some manner with this, whatever it is” (paragraph 4).
The narrator speaks about the confusion between the true reality and his own creation, in which he deems as true. These two different worlds are merged together. A photograph offers evidence on what really happened, while literature is a piece that he can create and change. In this case the literature happens to be the actual passage. He collects his observations into the passage and ends with a photo, but as he stares at the photo, his mind trails off to possible alternatives to what he had actually observed. With more literature/imagination, the photo changed in his mind to a way to output his self-created scenarios.

“Michel is guilty of making literature, of indulging in fabricated unrealities. Nothing pleases him more than to imagine exceptions to the rule” (paragraph 16).
- Literature is connoted as only fiction in this case. The narrator writes these fictions, which goes against the “rule,” which means the true reality.

“…and the first day he spent some time looking at it and remembering, that gloomy operation of comparing memory with a reality that is lost, a frozen memory, like any photo, where nothing is missing, not even, and especially, nothingness, the real fixer of the scene” (paragraph 20).
- “Memory” refers to his imagination while “reality that is lost” is what really happened, but because of his fabrications, he has turned to believe in them as true. It has turned into a photo, which is supposedly a depiction of the actual event.

Thesis:
The separation between reality and imagination is distorted, leaving the narrator remnants of the truth and his self-created memories, in which he combines together to form his own perverse reality.

Linda Pham