Titles and Cities

In class we had discussed on how similar yet different all the cities named in Invisible Cities were. Physically and visually they were quite different. However, if the book was read according to sections, by this I mean reading all the five sections of "Cities and Memory" and then all the five sections of "Cities and Desire" amongst others, we would be able to find that the cities were all quite similar.

In order to truly understand the book we have to interpret it in a simbolic way, by this meaning in a non literal form. If this is true, then the figurative meaning of the cities would be the knowledge that is out there in the world. Having this hypothesis in mind I started searching for similarities in between the cities, and those   that belonged in each section. For instance, in "Cities and The Dead" 2, " On the dock the sailor who caught the rope and tied it to the bollard resembled a man who had soldiered with me and was dead...The girl was identical with one in my village who had gone mad for love and killed herself" (Pg. 94) or for example in "Cities and The Dead 5", "It is the Laudomia of the dead, the cemetery. But Laudomia's special faculty is that of being not only double, but triple; it comprehends, in short, a third Laudomia, the city of the unborn." 

It can be seen that in both cases the author is speaking about cities who have the same characteristics, those who relate to death, or in "Cities and Desire" those related to human desire etc. Basically this all sums up to the fact that in the end, knowledge is different and though some can to be very similar it is never quite the same. Knowledge comes in different sizes and doses, never being completely identical.