Continuity of Parks

The unnamed protagonist in “Continuity of Parks” is a minimally developed, passive character whose key role is that of a reader of fiction. The story opens with him taking care of practical affairs connected to his estate; once these are cleared away, he returns to his reading. The business he attends to seems like an interruption of his true calling: leisure.

A seemingly well-to-do estate owner, he savors his secluded and comfortable life. He is a conventional, privileged, and leisured representative of the status quo. He embodies the traditional, passive kind of reader that Cortázar’s story criticizes. This protagonist wants nothing more than to immerse himself, to “lose” himself in his reading. He reads for escape, entertainment, and vicarious thrills. Reading, for him, is a slightly titillating amusement, an “almost perverse pleasure” (63). In the safety of his estate, he can indulge in the thrills of criminal passion in ways that do not compromise but instead enhance the comfort and ease of his privileged life.

Apart from a brief interaction with an estate manager, the protagonist is presented alone in his act of reading, until the final sentence of the story. He relishes his solitude. While the ending of “Continuity of Parks” tantalizes with its supposition that the reader-protagonist is about to be killed by his wife’s lover, up to this point there has been no indication in the