The Distinction Between Wishing and Wanting: "The Island at Noon" Anonymous 10th Grade

“The Island At Noon” by Julio Cortazar follows main character Marini, who works as a flight attendant flying over the Aegean sea and wishes to travel to an island he observes out the window. However, when he makes it to the island, while he finds it as beautiful as he thought it would be, the story ends with his ambiguously set death. This uncertainty and the reader not being allowed to experience it fully through Marini’s eyes leads them to question what happened. Did Marini die on the plane or the island? Did the plane crash? What happens to the mind after death? To elaborate on the previous question, what would happen if one dies while dreaming? To explore this idea, Cortazar wrote the story solely from Marini’s point of view, preventing the readers from gaining outside knowledge of the situation. He limits the written dialogue to the very beginning, before the idea of playing with reality is brought up at all, and ends with what he thinks would happen if one is unable to differentiate between truth and fiction. Cortazar wrote from Marini’s perspective to limit the reader’s ability to accurately differentiate between reality and fantasy and to show the danger of being stuck in a dream and forgetting to live.

Cortazar only...