43 pages • 1 hour read
Adolfo Bioy CasaresThe Invention of Morel
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1940A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Essay Topics
Why might this novella have had the impact and influence it’s had? What traces of it emerge in science fiction or magical realist works?
Analyze the food imagery in the text, including the editor’s footnotes. What do these images add to the text?
Compare and contrast this novella with H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau. Where does Bioy Casares deviate from Wells? What themes do the texts share?
Research the two songs repeated in the novella—“Tea for Two” and “Valencia.” What additional meaning is created by including these specific songs?
Research 1930s Venezuelan history. How does this context affect the novella? Is it a political text?
Bioy Casares was prescient about people’s relationships with artificial intelligence. What more contemporary works—literature or film—resonate with the concepts in this story? Explain the connection between the works.
Where in the story are there suggestions of environmental issues? How does the narrator’s Malthusianism inform how he views these issues? Are there other explanations?
The narrator states that his diary is also a way to keep the machines writing. What parallels are there between Morel’s machine and writing? Is writing a way to achieve immortality?
What role do allusions play in the text? For example, why does the narrator call out Cicero or Malthus specifically? How do these allusions deepen the text’s themes?
What is gained from using the epistolary form in the novella? How would the story change if it were narrated by a third-person narrator? How do the footnotes intervene with the narrator’s tale?
