House Taken Over

In my opinion, the story is making a statement about the changes in the way the "aristocracy" is viewed. This question of ancestry and ancestral homes is central to "House Taken Over," in which the narrator refers to his time as "a day when old houses go down for a profitable auction of their construction materials" (10) and feels that rather than letting the house be sold by distant cousins, it would be more just for him and his sister to "topple it [them]selves before it was too late" (11). Of course, they're never given that chance, and the mysterious intruders take over their family home, pushing its final "rightful" inhabitants into the street. Perhaps the invasion is Cortázar's way of portraying the slow death of Argentina's middle class.