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How Does The Girl Who Chase The Sun Magical Realism

Decent Essays

The Girl Who Chased the Moon demonstrates magical realism most effectively because of its relatability, subtlety, setting and atmosphere. Although it has blatant magical situations the primary plotline focuses on realistic narratives with elements of magic, as opposed to magic being the majority of the plot.

The Girl Who Chased the Moon contains characters with ordinary lives who experience normal and genuine emotions and have realistic narratives. For example, Sawyer is an estate agent but he has the ability to detect sweets (cakes, chocolates, etc). This is just apart of who he is, it isn’t addressed as something particularly odd. Even though it is something out of the norm it isn’t further investigated or explained it’s just stated as …show more content…

Because the magic is subtle and doesn’t drive the narrative it allows you to relate to the characters in a way you wouldn’t normally be able to. These characters face everyday problems (unlike the ones in Penelope or The Night Circus where their motives are often driven by their surroundings which have heavy magical influences, more so than in the Girl Who Chased the Moon) such as, falling in love with a popular boy, feeling scared of having a relationship, grieving for passed loved ones and feeling out of place in new places that you aren’t used to. Julia and Sawyer go through a lot of things that are relatable to a large audience, they have sex but when a relationship is suggested Sawyer gets scared of change and the judgement of others and backs out. Emily also deals with a lot of things that majority of the world has had to deal with, losing a parent(/a loved one), feeling scared and out of place in a new home and falling in love. These emotions are something that everyone can relate to feeling at least once in their life, making the matter of magic obsolete. It doesn’t matter if you can’t relate to certain aspects of the characters as long as you can relate to parts of them and what emotionally drives them. The unusual is overlooked in favour of the emotions which makes abnormal normal and accepted because of how without question it’s accepted in the …show more content…

The small town setting in which everyone knows everyone makes Emily feel abnormal like she doesn’t belong, even though the town has more abnormal qualities that she does. The feeling of community gives off indifference to the magical happenings because they are their everyday norms and are seen as mundane. They accept a lot of things, the male Coffeys’ glowing; the Mullaby lights; Vance’s height, because it’s simply the way their world works. It makes you feel like you need to accept the magic for what it is, the norm, or move on. The atmosphere of a small town also makes you feel like you’re in the presence of magic. When Emily ran through the forest chasing after something that shouldn’t really be real we were able to suspend are disbelief because the magic didn’t outweigh the realism. She heard footprints and bandages were put on the porch for her, furthering the realistic narrative with hints of magic. Nothing outright magical happened, enabling us to allow this chain of events to astonish us without it being unbelievable. It was further normalised when Julia didn’t dispute the lights, she just scolded Emily for chasing

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