Research Paper on:
Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
indicates in his "Table of Instructions" that it is actually two books. Cortazar writes that the second book begins with chapter 73 and then follows a specified sequence that is  indicated at the end of each chapter. However, in case of confusion, Cortazar offers a list: 71 -1 - 116 -3 - 84 - 4, and so forth for 140  more chapters (Bryan 155). Needless to say, Hopscotch is somewhat hard going, as it presents a narrative that spirals and doubles back on itself. However, as critics C.D.B.  Bryan indicates, Hopscotch is worth the effort as it also "the most powerful encyclopedia of emotions and visions to emerge from the postwar generation of international writers" (155). At  its bare-bones essence, Hopscotch is about a forty-something bohemian, Horacio Oliveira, and his search for meaning in life in Paris and Buenos Aires. Oliveira spends a great deal of  time playing intellectual mind games with his circle of friends. His girlfriend, of the moment, is La Maga (The Magician), who is seen by herself and the others as their  intellectual inferior. However, Cortazar makes it clear that La Maga is, in many ways, superior to the others, including Oliveira, because she is intuitive and straightforward, with "neither need nor  capacity for the others hyper-intellectualization (Peavier 100). La Maga is completely devoted to Oliveira. However, possibly because of his own relationships with other women, Oliveira is intensely jealous and  eventually leaves La Maga because he suspects that she has had, or may have in the future, an affair with one of the members of his group of friends. He  leaves her soon after the death of her infant son, and although he searches for her in Paris and her native Uruguay, he never finds her. The second part