Aura and the use of Magical Realism

 The part of magical realism that I though applied best to Aura was the authorial resistance. When I was reading the story, many of the events going on seemed out of the ordinary and made me feel uneasy; however, the protagonist in the story did not seem worried about these same things. For example, he seemed very accepting of the fact that the house was always very dark and simply adjusted instead of questioning why. More important, throughout the story there are mentions of very obscure things such as burning cats on the roof, and the growing of plants with unique medicinal qualities. Although our protagonist recognizes all of these elements, he does not seem to give them a second thought. As a reader, this caused me great confusion because I did not know if the house or the women were somehow enchanting him to not care, or if he really did not put together the weird elements of what was going on. In a way, this story had a huge quality of the Fantastic because the reader is not sure until the end if Aura is a really girl or if she was produced by supernatural quality. The use of authorial resistance and magical realism in general does a great job of creating this Fantastic feeling.