Bruce Holland Rogers Magical Realism

What is magical realism? In an article called “What Is Magical Realism, Really?” by Bruce Holland Rogers states that magical realism stories are told “From the perspective of people who live in our world and experience a different reality from the one that we call objective.” This means that some things that would be out of the ordinary for us would be completely normal for other people. Fantasy does not relate to magical realism because magic realism has other effects on the way people act around things than fantasy.

The first effect of magical realism is that the magical and the ordinary are one and the same this means that nothing is strange. One example of this is in the movie Big Fish where a giant was in the city and he was eating all the farm animals. The people in the town's reaction was that they wanted the giant out of town, they were not freaked out by the giant and acted as if it happened every day. Another example is in the movie Big Fish, where the narrator tells the story of a big fish that he tried to catch for many years but he could not.

One example of this is in the story “The Night Face Up” by Julio Cortazar, in the story a man who is being sacrificed by the aztecs and he is having visions to the future. One vision he had was that he was in a hospital room being operated on after being in a motorcycle accident, later in the dream he referred to the motorcycle as a “big humming insect”. Another example that time is not linear is in the book Bless Me, Ultima in the first chapter a boy has a dream about the day he was born and it explains the two different families arguing whether he will be a farmer or a vaquero. This explains that he was able to see the feud that went on about what side of the family he was to go on when he was older. During the entire book his mom and dad would argue about what side of the family he should be