Aura is a novel that explores the corporeality of aging, the eternal nature of desire, and the struggle with mortality. What immediately strikes the reader is the narrative in the second person in the present tense, a stylistic choice which we know has numerous effects both on the story and on the reader's reactions. The narrative voice of the short story, which the reader considers to be that of the protagonist, Felipe Montero, seems relatively simple and linear. After all, the present tense means that the reader can follow the action without difficulty, and the familiar form of the "t" has the effect of increasing the intimacy of the reading experience to a degree not possible in other narrative modes. However, upon reflection, it becomes apparent that the narrative voice is much more complex and deviant than initially thought. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essayFar from being simple, the narrative voice could be seen as a key, or at least a suggestion, to solving one of the big questions. this question remains unanswered in the plot: how the reader is to understand the strange identity of Felipe and General Llorante. The reader is effectively told that he has become, or always was, the same person; 'Tap with one hand the white beard of General Llorente, I imagine him with the pelo negro and siempre meets you, borrado, perdido, olvidado, pero t, t, t'[1]. Although Aura holds a sort of black mass with the erotic ritual earlier in the story, there was never any sign of Felipe's physical change. It is possible that he is the reincarnation of the General given that the fragmentation of time is one of Fuente's favorite themes. However, there is no real indication of this in Aura and nothing really suggests it in the narrative voice. What the narrator's language as well as the unusual, almost dreamlike sensation of time might imply, however, is that Aura may be a subjective experience. It may be controversial, although far from unfounded, to suggest that the narrator is unreliable. Unreliable narratives were not uncommon in Latin American literature, and the duplication, or superposition, of realities and people is precisely one of the symptoms of schizophrenia. It is therefore not audacious to propose the narrator as a “madman”. Several sections of the story could add to this argument; Montero's entrance to the house on Donceles Street is metaphorically the entrance to the labyrinth. Once inside, he is unable to see his path and does not know where each step will take him. All the gothic features of the house: the horrible smell, the rats, the smell of burning cat fur, the perpetual darkness and the maze of corridors could easily be seen as the world from a man's point of view falling more and more into madness. . This catastrophic phrase, “Tratas, in tilmente, de retener una sola imagen de ese mundo outside indiferenciado”[2], considered from this angle, distinctly resembles the thoughts of a man desperately and hopelessly trying to retain some part of his sanity. Additionally, once he enters the house, his personality seems to strangely change; he makes very little effort to leave and does not wonder how the servant could have brought his things. It's as if, now that he has entered the world of madmen, he finds refuge there. Therefore, we are now faced with the argument that Aura is simply the account of one man's illusion. However, to simply ignore the story as schizophrenic ramblings would be to ignore one of the fundamental conceptsof the novel: the idea of ​​superposition, of Consuelo and Aura, but also Felipe and General Llorante, as well as the notion of superposition of the past on the present. A careful reading makes it clear that the layering exists not only on the plot level but also separately within the narrative voice. This can be explained very simply by first taking an example from the text; after Aura makes love with Felipe, she becomes Consuelo's echo: “la senora Consuelo que te sonrie, cabeceando, que te sonrie junto con Aura que mueve la cabeza al mismo tiempo que la vieja…”[3 ]. Throughout the following passage, Consuelo and Aura overlap, converge and diverge and the reader becomes aware that Felipe has made love with two women and yet the same woman. This confusing layering of characters is reflected in a similar situation in the narrative voice. The second person narrator inevitably means that the narrator is also the protagonist. Felipe Montero gradually unfolds into these two different functions, but not in the traditional way that a first-person narrator who is also a character would do. Felipe is both the subject and the object of the narration; he tells his own story but the protagonist's sense of free will is simultaneously compromised by Felipe the narrator. A distance is thus created between the two different “Felipes”, who are paradoxically the same person. This double condition is consistent with the theme; there is an obvious case of superposition, of entities that merge. The narrator is forced to assume a dual identity because he effectively produces a scenario that is interpreted by the character. So the narrator is and is not the character. He is the character and yet, because of the distance created by the second person, he assumes the reader's point of view. There is therefore an obvious case of superposition since the narrator is obliged to be both himself and the other. This dualism is surely the same as that which underlies the Consuelo/Aura and Llorante/Felipe relationships. This argument also greatly devalues ​​the idea of ​​the narrator as mad, because it shows how Fuentes, rather than writing from the delusional mind of a schizophrenic, was able to use the narrator to reinforce the dualism that we read about and which horrifies us in the plot. Furthermore, the superposition of two languages, the Spanish of the story and the French of General Llorante's memoirs, fulfills a similar function. The resulting narrative voice is certainly not simple; it is both connected to and separate from the plot, reflecting its themes while also containing complex, overlapping relationships as an entity in itself. The narrative voice is also crucial to fully understanding Fuentes' exploration of time in Aura, and it is particularly apparent in this aspect that, both figuratively and literally, the narrative voice is certainly not simple. Fuentes attacks time[4] using second-person narrative combined with an enigmatic future that both denies and destroys time. The heavy use of the present tense in the vast majority of the story means that the narrator focuses on what is happening at the moment he speaks. Through a clever manipulation of language, the present is presented as a series of fleeting moments that the reader is never allowed to discover in more depth before the narrator moves on. This is partly achieved by simple enumerations devoid of verbs, such as "recorres la Mirada el cuarto: el tapete de lana rojo, la vieja mesa de trabajo, nogal y cuero verde, la lampara Antigua de quinqua, luz opaca de tus noches of investigation. …'[5]. The narrator focuses on each object for a split second before immediately moving on to the next one, creating the illusionof continuous action and accelerating the pace of the narration. It can be argued that, through the narrator's use of language, Fuentes is trying to present time as something incessant and fluid, and by showing it this way, the reader's mind is opened to the possibility that time history can bend, return and be recreated in the present. The narrator also tends to use active rather than stative verbs in order to lend character dynamics to the novel's still-life descriptions, such as "Las sinfonolas no perturban, las lunas de mercurio no iluminan, la baratijas expuestas no adoran ese seguno rostro de los edificios”[6]. Again, this creates the idea of ​​each moment coexisting with each other, constantly looking for the next moment to come. The narrator never dwells on a specific detail, except perhaps when the future tense is applied. The future tense is used with caution in Aura. This can in some cases create a distance between one moment and the next, creating a sense of time fluctuating. For example, “ella colocara el candelabro en el centro de la mesa” and “Aura apartara la cacerola”[7], taken from the scene of Felipe and Aura’s first dinner. Here it is used to represent inner, psychological time, as opposed to chronological time; it thus acts as the literary equivalent of slow motion in a film[8]. The future is also used later to deviate from chronological time. When Felipe discovers the identities of Consuelo/Aura and himself/General Llorante, chronological time loses its meaning for him and each moment becomes a thrilling moment separated by the next by an eternity of time - 'Una vida, un siglo, five years: it will not be possible for you to imagine these medidas mythologies, it will be possible for you to be between the hands that are polvo sin cuerpo'[9]. The dramatic narrative voice is what distorts the reader's sense of linear time and helps us realize that the book momentarily returns to a kind of illo tempore, abolishing linear time[10] and containing a strange, chaist feeling of returning to past or linear time. to oneself. On a first reading, it is easy to overlook the subconscious effects that Aura's narrative voice has on us, as a reader, and in this way, it is fair to say that she is direct and misleading. There is certainly more than one way to interpret the narrative voice, as this discussion demonstrates, but what is most important is that the narrator performs the difficult and complex function of reflecting the dual and overlapping characters of the novel by himself realizing more of a role. The narrator is also a crucial means of expressing the eternal nature of time and, in the novel, its ability to fluctuate and oscillate so that the story can find, through the narrator, a way to return. The narrator is therefore not at all simple, he represents the complex and deviant layers of characters, desire and time.BibliographyBooks FUENTES, C. Aura (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965) WILLIAMS, RL The Writings of Carlos Fuentes (University of Texas Press, 1996) DELDEN, VM Carlos Fuentes, Mexico and Modernity (Liverpool University Press, 1998)ArticlesFUENTES, C. On Reading and Writing Myself: How I Wrote Aura. Published in World Literature Today, Vol. 57, no. 4 (Columbia University Press, 1983) FARIS, BW The return of the past: chiasmus in the texts of Carlos Fuentes. Published in World Literature Today, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Columbia University Press, 1983) ALAZRAKI, J. Theme and System in Aura by Carlos Fuentes. Published in “Carlos Fuentes” (University of Texas Press, 1982) DAUSTER, F. The Wounded Vision: Aura, Zona Sagrada and Cumpleanos. Published in “Carlos Fuentes” (University of Texas Press, 1982) LEAL, L. History and myth in the story of Carlos Fuentes. Published in° 4, 1983)