Magical Realism to Conquer Emotions Alexandra Karadzas College

There are a handful of logical approaches and techniques that human beings use to rationalize and understand situations we are not completely sure of. When placed in a situation in which we feel trauma or fear, our immediate reaction is to concoct a way to understand what is going on specifically to us. Though this is a common human reaction to uncertainty, we see children use this tactic more often than adults. One literary device commonly connected to children’s understanding of the unknown is magical realism. Magical realism is an approach that tells its stories from the perspective of people who live in our world and experience a different reality than the current one. In magical realism, the aspects that make it “magical” are not fictional, but what is actually being experienced by the present character; the magical and ordinary are one in the same. In the works The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz and See Under: Love by David Grossman, we see children use magical realism as a device to better understand the trauma and fear present in their young lives. Through magical realism, we are invited to see the world through the characters eyes in these works and understand how Schulz and Grossman use this approach to help...