#AP Spanish Literature Study Guide: "La noche boca arriba" 🏍️➡️ 🪦

Welcome! Let's break down "La noche boca arriba" by Julio Cortázar. This guide is designed to make sure you're feeling confident and ready for the AP exam. We'll cover everything from plot to literary devices, and even some practice questions. Let's get started!

#1. Plot Summary: A Journey Between Worlds 🌃 ➡️ 🌿

• Initial Setting: A man leaves a hotel on his motorcycle at 8:50 AM and rides through a city. He enters a lavish neighborhood and gets into an accident with an old woman. He's seriously injured and taken to a hospital.

  Caption: The accident that sets the stage for the story's dual realities.

• Hospital and Dreams: As he falls asleep, he has vivid dreams of being chased by Aztecs in a jungle. He experiences this dream multiple times, each time waking up in the hospital, only to fall back into the dream.

• Dream Intensifies: The dream sequences become more intense. He is captured, then finds himself on a sacrificial stone. He is terrified and tries to wake up, but the dream pulls him back.

• The Twist: In the final moments, he realizes that the 'modern' city and the motorcycle were the dream, and he was actually living in the time of the Aztecs, about to be sacrificed. 🤯

#2. Key Themes: Reality vs. Illusion 🎭

• #El tiempo y el espacio (Time and Space)

  • The story plays with the concept of time and space. The man's experiences in the hospital and the jungle seem to happen simultaneously, with a few hours in the hospital mirroring a few hours in the jungle.
  • The time of the day changes from morning to night in the hospital, but in the dream, it is always night.

• #La construcción de realidad (The Construction of Reality)

  • The story challenges our perception of reality. What we initially perceive as the 'real' world is revealed to be a dream, and vice versa. This highlights the fluidity of reality and the power of the mind. 💡

  • Cortázar demonstrates how the human mind moves between dream and reality, blurring the lines between the two.

  ![A Terrible Feeling](https://zupay.blob.core.windows.net/resources/files/0baca4f69800419293b4c75aa2870acd_...