Magical realism: The Black and White of Zebra Crossing - Sarah

When I look up the definition of magical realism, it is often described as fiction in which magical or supernatural phenomena appear in an otherwise realistic setting. However, I am more drawn to the idea that magical realism is “a realist view of the world that incorporates magical elements.” Rather than openly announcing the presence of the supernatural, magical realism creates a constant collision between the natural and the uncanny. It feels like looking at zebra crossing: strips of reality and strips of the surreal stacked together, shifting, interchanging, and never fully settling. This instability blurs the line between illusion and actuality. Yet there is always something—a fixed point, a pole—that the protagonist uses to measure what is real.

In the fragment of Solaris, this pole is Harey, who Kelvin believes should be sleeping beside him. “Harey? Why couldn’t I hear her breathing? I felt the bedding with my hand: I was alone(1).” This moment marks the version of the world that Kelvin distrusts, the one he senses is an illusion. By the end of the fragment, however, “there was a rustling sound next to me(3).” The world Kelvin prefers—the one he considers real—is the one in which Harey lies next to him. According to the summary provided on Blackboard, the story soon turns toward the question of whether the wife beside him is actually alive, or merely an apparition of his dead wife. In this sense, Kelvin’s “reality” is not reality itself, but simply the world he is more inclined to inhabit because of Harey’s presence.

This raises the question: how should we define reality? I believe reality, in literature, is often shaped by whichever version the narrator embraces. Fiction becomes a space of idealism, a worldview filtered entirely through the protagonist. What they believe becomes the world we accept. And when their belief is challenged, the stability of that world dissolves—yet we continue to follow them.

In The City and Its Uncertain Walls, the protagonist enters the walled town after abandoning his shadow outside the gate. The wall becomes his new pole, the measure of whether he is in “reality.” At first he thinks he has entered the true world to find the “real girl,” but when he discovers that she has no memory of him, and when he notices that the townspeople speak plainly and lack intellectual curiosity, the world he trusted begins to unravel. The setting reveals its hallucinatory qualities, and he must confront the possibility that the town—or even he himself—may not be real.

The perception of reality in magical-realist fiction is like walking across a zebra crossing: say the white stripes represent reality, the black stripes illusion. But when you actually step forward, you cannot tell whether your next footfall will land in white, black, or somewhere unknown.