In Explosion and Other Stories by Julio Cortazar, the short stories Letter to a Young Woman in Paris, Continuity of the Parks and Explosion demonstrate the theme of hiding reality. Cortazar uses intertwined imagery and symbolism throughout his short stories to disguise the overall message. In Letter to a Young Woman in Paris, there is an allusion to the main character's repression as he writes about his ongoing problem with rabbit vomiting and his eventual suicide. In Parks' story Continuity, a man reads a story and discovers that he is part of a dramatic love story and is murdered by the novel's main character, demonstrating repressed sexual desire. In Blow-Up, Cortazar uses careful imagery of the scene to disguise a larger story between a young boy and an older woman captured by a photographer. These three individual stories both demonstrate the theme of concealment through the use of symbolism and imagery. In Cortazar's Letter to a Young Woman in Paris, Cortazar uses the symbolism of rabbits to represent the main character's repression and concealment of the repression. In the story, the main character moves into the apartment of an absent young woman and in Paris. Instead of providing a description of the woman and her connection to the main character, Cortazar provides a description of the apartment. Such descriptions act as a representation of the woman herself. For example, as the main character says: “It hurts me to enter an atmosphere where someone who lives magnificently has arranged everything as a visible affirmation of his soul…” (Cortazar, 39 years old). With the apartment as a representation of this woman's soul, the main character feels like he and the rabbits are encroaching on this...... middle of paper ...... and the clouds. Cortazar focuses on the imagery of clouds and pigeons, which hides the larger story between the boy and the woman. The images also escape the photographer's hallucinations, instead of actually seeing the pigeons and clouds he hallucinates and in the end these images are on a projector. For example, “…like a period of inverted crying, and little by little the frame becomes clearer, perhaps the sun rises, and again the clouds begin to arrive, two by two… And the pigeons of from time to time…” (Cortazar, 131). These images of the clouds and pigeons end up becoming the projections of the photographer's mind when he projects these images onto the enlargement. The enlargement itself becomes instrumental for the photographer because it becomes a revelation of the projected reality. The photographer's misinterpretation of reality is his way of projecting his reality.