The handsomest drowned man in the world: a tale for children

The handsomest drowned man in the world: a tale for children

There are some stories that transport us to a different world, where even a small success can fracture the everyday schedule and make every person’s life different, and this lecture from Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a good example. The author of this lecture makes a fusion between fantasy and realism resulting in a particular style of writing, full of details and giving a real meaning for the tale.

The start of the lecture is full of elements that can be identified as absurd. In this part, the author writes: “The first children who saw the dark and slinky bulge approaching through the sea let them think it was an enemy ship. Then they saw it had no flags or mast and they thought it was a whale”. This part is giving the illusion of the size of the drown person, even comparing it with a ship and a whale, all these absurd elements give the lecture its fantasy character and continue using the same form with this part: “They had been playing with him all afternoon, burying him in the sand and digging him up again”, using the sense of innocence of the children the author keeps telling the history in a fantasy way.

While the history keeps been tell, it’s easy to find more elements with the same characteristics, more elements that can be catalogue as absurd, when the men of the village carry the body to a house they notice how heavy it was, very different from any other person dead or alive in the village, and stating “maybe he’d been floating too long and the water had got into his bones”.

A success like this on a very small village causes a big commotion, pushing everybody off their everyday routine, men didn’t go to the sea that day and women took the labor of clean and fix the drowned man. In this case an exaggeration when mention that he was the tallest, strongest, most virile and best built men they have ever seen, in this way there’s another absurd element in the story on the mention: “They could not find a bed in the village large enough to use for his wake. The tallest men’s holiday pants would not fit nor the fattest one’s Sunday shirts, nor the shoes of the one with the biggest feet”.

The women in the village stayed fascinated with the proportions and beauty of this stranger, and doing more work than they would do for another stranger in the same situation, perhaps because the impression he caused being so different from the other men in the village and the ones at the neighboring villages. They even did some special clothes to fit the man from a large piece of sail and bridal Brabant linen. These women secretly compared him with their own men, thinking how different their lives would be with a man like this. They even had a name for him, Esteban.

The absurd elements relevant to the size of the man body continue, “There had not been enough canvas, the poorly cut and worse sewn pants were too tight and the hidden strength of his heart popped the buttons on his shirt”. It was a lot of attention from the women to the preparations of this man’s funeral; they dress him, combed his hair cut his nails and shave him.

At this point the story takes a different point of view, the women surprised with this man started to feel sorry about him,

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