Imagination in the Urban Space of Luis Aguilar-Monsalve’s Narrative

Abstract

This article poses that the short fiction of Ecuadorian narrator Luis Aguilar Monsalve explores new ways of representing reality. His efforts result in a work on the fringe of the fantastic and the postmodern. A reader can see its narratological desire to step away from mere mimetic representation and successfully attempt to discover new ways of telling that evoke the use of simulacrum, virtual reality, and other models that question the persistence of real time. Within this framework, we find a predilection for narrating the city as a space where human beings often unsuccessfully struggle to communicate with each other in urban areas saturated with human traits and emotions.