The Short Stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez Essay
The Short Stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Short story writer. Novelist. Journalist. Political activist. Nobel Prize winner. Most beloved of 20th
century Latin American authors, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1928, in the small
coastal town of Aracataca, Colombia. He published his first story, The Third Resignation, in 1947
and began studying law and journalism. His first novel, Leafstorm, was published in 1955, the
same year the Colombian government shut down his employer, the newspaper El Espectador. In
1958, after 14 years of engagement, he married Mercedes Burcha and began working for the
Caracas newspaper, El Momento. During the Cuban Revolution in 1959, he worked for Cuba s
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However, they incorporate a variety of compelling themes, focusing primarily on death and the
fantastic, insomnia and unreality, the absurd and the irrational, and are told often from skillfully
interwoven, scrambled points of view. In these stories, Garcia Marquez is attempting to capture the
world as presented in Kafka s Metamorphosis. He is striving to not only portray the world as it is,
but to invent another dreamlike reality, and in the process demonstrate that the reality and the
dream are one and the same. These bizarre and occasionally disturbing excursions into surreal states
of consciousness are poignantly Kafkaesque.
For example, the story The Third Resignation, contains a vivid reenactment of Gregor Samsa s
bug like condition. In this story, instead of waking up as a dung beetle, the main character is
trapped in a frightening existence of living death. He has been living in a coffin for 18 years,
since he turned seven, when his mother was told by the doctor, Madam, your child has a grave
illness: he is dead. Nevertheless...we shall do everything possible to keep him alive beyond
death (5). Though he is dead, the main character continues to grow in size and also grows a
beard, indicating that he is medically not dead, but, like Gregor Samsa, is completely paralyzed.
He spends his entire life trying to figure out whether or not he is alive: A few moments before he
had been happy with his death because he had thought he was dead. Because a dead man
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