Response to the Iguana

Ana Maria Ortese’s fiction expresses the magical and otherworldly in a way that challenges her readers to reexamine their present reality.  By distorting the boundaries, edges, and limitations dividing the real and the unreal, the primary effect of Ortese's novel exists as an increase in the proximity of two worlds so that they are no longer two separate entities, but a single world that is both alien and familiar to her readers.  The reader is called upon o actively dismantle what seperates the real and the unreal revealing underlying truths regarding society and human nature in the process.  These truths would otherwise remain inaccessible if not for her installment of fantasy.  In short, The Iguana exemplifies Ortese’s preoccupation with the in-between.  Within this intermediate realm, her novel makes impossible the construction of any new division between what is real and what is unreal.  Instead, it seems to obscure those that already exist.  For example, it is clear that as the novel progresses into the second section, not even the narrator can be held reliable.  Orteses's characters are representational of mankind who tries to understand the world, but in doing so, they become more alien to it.  Such is the case with Daddo, who feels the need to interfere with the injustices on Ocana.  Ortese refrains from attempting to create a seperate, fantastical world in her fiction.  Instead, she forces the reader to question their own world by making her world of fantasy and our woeld of realism one in the same. In detaching her readers from reality within the context of The Iguana, Ortese is actually allowing them to uncover hidden truths reality their own realities—allowing them to view their reality from a place existing within her fantasy.