“Blow Up”.

By loading the beginning of the story with such explicit musings on the art and craft of writing and the function of storytelling, Cortázar bares his themes for the reader to plainly see. Perspective is an important theme of "Blow-Up," as is narrativization and the process of invention in fiction. First, Michel struggles to determine how he'll tell the story that he eventually proceeds to tell. The first line is, "It'll never be known how this has to be told, in the first person or in the second, using the third person plural or continually inventing modes that will serve for nothing" (114). The narrator seems not only to be questioning what is the proper mode of narration, but to be struggling with and lamenting the notion that he will likely fail to translate the experience adequately for his reader.