You have read ‘Adventure’ by Jayant Narlikar in Hornbill Class XI. Compare the interweaving of fantasy and reality in the two stories.

Both the stories have got elements of magic realism in them. They draw a unique parallelism between reality and fantasy. In The Adventure, we see that there is a professor named Gaitonde who goes into coma after he meets with an accident. While comatose, he reaches another world in the Indian history where the Marathas become victorious as Viswas Rao escapes narrowly from the bullet. The victory of Marathas brings about diverse changes and reforms in the country. This leads to an intermixing of fantasy with the reality as the actual course of events in the real world were very different. Similar is the case with the story The Third Level where Charley believes in the existence of a third level though only two had ever been built. He is so sure of the existence of the third level at the Grand Central Station that he gets his money exchanged to the old currency. His urge to travel to the world of 1890s becomes a strong obsession resulting in his parting from the real world for a few moments in the form of hallucinations.