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 Prensa Latina in Bogota, Cuba, and New ... Show more
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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