So far, the only thing I have been blogging about is the way the cities are described in the book and what they represent for me. However, I am now going to talk about the way the story changes in terms of narrator, time, and place.Towards the end of the first section of the book, Marco Polo is no longer describing cities. The story completely shifts to the situation in which Marco Polo is with the emperor Kublai Kahn. The narrator changes as well: now its not Marco polo talking in first person but instead its an omniscient narrator that talks in first person. I found it interesting how as soon as the situaton changed this way, it is ritten in italics, as if the narrator was making a parenthesis with the change of the situation.
Not only does the situation, narrator, and timing changed but I also interpreted Khan as a way of criticism towards society and human nature. When Marco Polo reported back from his voyages, he didnt bring what the emperor was looking for. Khan was interested in gold, therefore power, and Marco Polo always came from his voyages depicting cities as "the leap of a fish escaping the cormorant´s beak to fall into a net, , a naked man running throgh fire unscorched, and as a skull, its teeth green with mold, clenching a round, white pearl" (pg. 21).
This made me wonder whether those descriptions or interpretations of the cities by Marco Polo will mean anything farther in the book, and I also ask myself why Calvino writes this part of the story as if it were a parenthesis, an interference, and a situation aside from what the book had previously been about.The fact that all Khan was looking for was gold and not these descriptions Marco Polo brought with thim relates to the behavior of many people in a society today. All we are interested is money and power, instead of other things that matter more. So I am asking myself, are those descriptions by Marco Polo going to be important later in the book? Do they mean something more?
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