SOURCE: "Introduction: Toward the Last Square of the Hopscotch," in The Final Island: The Fiction of Julio Cortázar, edited by Jaime Alazraki and Ivar Ivask, University of Oklahoma Press, 1978, pp. 3-18.

Born in Argentina, Alazraki is an American educator and critic who has written extensively on Latin-American literature. In the following excerpt, he discusses philosophical themes raised in Hopscotch and compares the novel to Cortázar's short story "The Pursuer."

Cortázar's fictional world,… rather than an acceptance, represents a challenge to culture, a challenge, as he puts it, to "thirty centuries of Judeo-Christian dialectics," to "the Greek criterion of truth and error," to the homo sapiens, to logic and the law of sufficient reason and, in general, to what he calls "the Great Habit." If Borges's fantasies are oblique allusions to the situation of man in a world he can never fully fathom, to an order...