Mac Gushanas
Gabriel García Márquez
Biographical Essay
Gabriel García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928 in Aracataca, Colombia. In his childhood, Márquez listened to stories told by his family and grew up with his mother’s parents. These initial tales grew a desire inside Márquez to tell stories of his own, particularly those of his grandfather’s that influenced Márquez’s politics. Following the death of his grandfather around the age of eight, he moved back to live with his parents. He was a good student and showed a knack for the written word. Márquez went to secondary school at the Colegio Nacional, growing more interested in literature. Then, in 1946, Márquez started law school at the National University of Bogota, as well as publishing his first short stories in local newspapers. Due to the increasing political turmoil in the area, Márquez had to move to a university in Cartagena, where he continued writing for newspapers. Finally, in 1955, Márquez released his debut novel
Leaf Storm with a small local press. Over the next couple of years, he released other works and worked as a journalist. He slowed down to focus on raising his family, returning in 1967 with the release of One Hundred Years of Solitude , considered to be his greatest work. After many other acclaimed novels, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. Márquez is still alive today, although suffering from increasing stages of dementia, and is considered to be one of the greatest writers of his generation.

Summaries
“The Sea of Lost Time” is set in a small coastal village that is bombarded by garbage and terrible smells, forcing everyone to stay inside most of the time. This year, however, there is a change to pleasant roses that only a couple villagers notice. Tobías notices, although his lover Clotilde does not. At the same time, old Jacob’s wife tells him that she wants to be buried alive after smelling the roses; she takes it as a sign from God that she is ready to die. Old Jacob’s wife dies a couple of months later, and a new and even better aroma arrives. Many people arrive in excitement to the town, such as a priest proclaiming the village as being chosen by God. A man who says he is the richest in the world, Mr. Herbert, arrives and begins solving people’s problems provided they can give him something in return. After solving many of the villager’s problems, old Jacob comes to him but ends up losing his house and most of his possessions to Mr. Herbert. The smell changes once again for the worse, and everyone begins to leave. Tobías and Mr. Herbert go into the ocean to fish for crabs, as there is nothing left to do. They travel deep into the sea of the dead, where they find the body of old Jacob’s wife and an entire village of flowers. They return to land, Mr. Herbert leaves the village, and Tobías tells Clotilde about the village; she doesn’t believe him and tells him to be quiet.
“Death Constant Beyond Love” follows Senator Onésimo Sánchez, a politician who has been told he only has six months and eleven days to live. Although he has a wife and children, he tells no one about this. During his electoral campaign, the senator stops at a small village where he notices Laura Farina in the distance, immediately falling in love with her. The senator’s attitude about life is changing while he gives his typical speech and favors to the people. He is becoming a more mean-spirited and selfish person

rather than the kind and generous man he used to be. He meets with Nelson Farina in the village, a man who has consistently asked the senator to give him a fake identity card to be above the law. The senator has always refused. Laura is sent to dine with the Senator and plead for her father. Laura and the senator begin a weird affair of sorts, despite her being nearly twenty years younger. However, the senator has to grant her father’s request, and he begrudgingly does so; they never actually have sex with one another. Six months later at the time of his death, the senator has been destroyed by a public scandal regarding
Laura, and she is no longer by his side.
“The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock” is set at José’s Restaurant, where an unnamed prostitute typically arrives exactly at six o’clock everyday for a free steak. This time, however, she says she was early to the restaurant and is clearly a little rattled, but
José continually teases her and says how much he loves the woman. The conversation turns into a hypothetical situation where the prostitute has killed a man after sleeping with him; she says he was very mean and disgusting, and the prostitute might’ve even killed him in self-defense. José gets more and more agitated with the prostitute since she will not tell the truth. The prostitute continues pleading with José to say whether or not he would tell a lie for a woman who killed a man. José says that he would, and the prostitute says that this is her last day in town. She is leaving tomorrow, but will not tell José where she is going. José finally cooks her a steak while another customer comes into the restaurant. The prostitute reminds José one more time about the time she came in; clearly, she has just committed murder and needs José for her alibi.

Craft Analysis
Owing to his standing as one of the foremost writers in the magical realism genre,
Gabriel García Márquez uses many fantastical elements in his work, subtly incorporating dreams and otherworldly events and making them seem almost commonplace. This device is on display in his
Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories
. With a very clean writing style, a strong sense of place, and deeply thoughtful point of views, Márquez is able to create multiple stories all tied into the inevitability of death, great loneliness, and other tragic happenings of humanity.
Despite many of his characters not having any backstory revealed or much dialogue, Márquez can characterize them successfully through their thoughts and feelings with precise word choice. In “Death Constant Beyond Love,” Senator Sánchez used to be a happy family man and politician, but with the realization of his impending death, he has turned sour and bitter, evidenced by his decision “to endure his secret all alone… out of shame” (85). Rather than tell his family and close ones what is happening, the senator fumes inside, angry with himself for succumbing to death. The choice to have the character full of “shame” indicates him as one crippled and destroyed by death. Further, through the third person limited point of view in this story, Márquez describes how negative and alone the senator is feeling while he is giving a campaign speech. The whole event is “his circus” (85), as he feels “a strange disdain for those who were fighting for the good luck to shake his hand” (85). These words hit hard and identify the senator as a mean man at this point, entirely alone in his anger.
Elsewhere, dialogue is employed extensively in “The Woman Who Came at Six
O’Clock” to create confusion and increase tension. José constantly calls the prostitute

“queen” (155), initially confusing the reader about their relationship. Their relationship is expounded upon further when it is revealed that the prostitute says she hasn’t “got any money” (157) to pay for food. José rebuffs and replies that he always fixes her
“something good” (157) anyways. Through these two lines of dialogue, the reader is clear that José feels close with the prostitute and wants to comfort her. This characterization of
José extends into the elaborate hypothetical situation that the prostitute later offers him.
Márquez uses much repetition here to suggest the idea that the prostitute has killed a man: she constantly asks José if he “really loves” (108) her and whether or not he “would tell a lie” (109) for her. By the prostitute’s insistent repeating, the reader begins to think that she has actually committed the murder herself, and it is not just some random thought she is having. Nearly this entire story is told through dialogue, heavily blurring the line between which character is telling the truth and who is morally right.
Interestingly, in “Death Constant Beyond Love,” a story with little dialogue, the last line of dialogue is extremely tragic and summarizes so much about the senator. He is simply lying down with Laura, feeling her body next to his, when he says “it’s good to be with someone when you’re so alone” (93). The character, up to this point, has only been revealed through his thoughts, showing a depressed and lonely man who is devastated with his impending death. Here, in this one line of dialogue, the senator finally tells someone about his fears and his thoughts. He has a good family and support from the community, yet he feels entirely alone until he is with Laura. This line of dialogue begins to characterize the senator as a tragic character, made all the worse in the next paragraph with the summarization of his terrible last six months alive.

The sense of place rounds out many of these stories as well. The opening description in “The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock” is of José restaurant, where “it had just struck six… [and] the regular customers wouldn’t begin to arrive until six-thirty.
His clientele was so conservative and regular that the clock hadn’t finished striking six when a woman entered, as on every day at that hour” (155). Immediately, the reader learns that the woman is an atypical customer of José’s who comes at her own time, in addition to the fact that time is very important to the story. In the beginning, time seems to be what draws these two characters to the same spot everyday. However, as the story unravels, it is clear that the woman is trying to use time to her advantage for her alibi.
The seacoast village in “The Sea of Lost Time” rules the story with “its heavy garbage… [and] contaminated mood” (60). Since the aroma of the village is nasty and unappealing, “no one stayed awake after eight o’clock” (60). Márquez has crafted a place ruined by the smell of death and the stink of the sea, seeping into the lives of the townspeople. When the “fragrance of roses” (60) arrives, the town begins to burst with life once again. The village really is its own character that determines the lives of its citizens with the changing smells. Depending on the aroma, the townsfolk thrive or they suffer, with many even sensing the changing of smells as coming death.
Strangely, the endings of many of the stories here are very brief summations of large periods of time. The author utilizes one lengthy sentence to carry across the senator’s final six months of life, “debased and repudiated because of the public scandal with Laura Farina and weeping with rage at dying without her” (93). The decision to tell of the remaining months of the senator’s life in one sentence makes the sadness and loneliness of the end of his life so much stronger. Rather than read passages of people

learning about the scandal, the reader simply knows that it destroyed and left him all alone. Similarly, the end of “Eva is Inside Her Cat,” a very strange story about a spirit who can live in multiple objects and beings, is shocking and twists the entire story around. Once again, it is all explained in one sentenced, simply revealing that the protagonist has been thinking about things in the story for “three thousand years” (130).
The revelation of so much time passing is told matter-of-factly that the astonishment of the revelation seems normal even, and actually makes the story work.
Sometimes, his sentence structure is used elsewhere in the story to further bring down the supernatural or elevate the impact. In “The Sea of Lost Time,” Tobías actually enters “the sea of the dead” (79), but the brief sentence this phrase appears in nearly makes the reader miss the unbelievable aspect of the place. One moment, he is swimming in the sea and, wonderfully, Márquez makes it fully believable that he swims right into so many “forgotten souls” (79). The idea that such a place is possible would not be as realistic if the author went to great lengths of explaining it and describing it; it simply is there and the character is experiencing the real thing as we are.
Lastly, his point of view is usually through the third person to allow for both vivid descriptions of the life and place and the deep inner thoughts of death and loneliness that he likes to write about. It is very interesting that his stories are very personal and deal with serious emotions, yet are almost always in the third person rather than first person.
The one story told from the first person, “The Night of the Curlews,” is in first person plural, revolving around a “we” who have had their “eyes pecked out by the curlews”
(178). The story is extremely difficult to understand, partly because the “we” is never fully explained. Here, too, the story is not really concerned with serious emotions and

somewhat descends into the “we” just asking different people for help since they cannot see. Márquez uses the first person plural for a more stylistic choice and loses a lot of the pathos and feeling he gets from the third person. Further, because of the first person, there is not much explanation as to what is exactly happening, complicating the story even more. Contrastingly, in “Death Constant Beyond Love,” the senator’s increasing disdain for his campaign and speech is felt strongly, by calling it a “farce” (86). Just before, the senator had laid and made a “great effort at mental distraction so as not to think about death while he dozed” (84). The entire personality and being of the senator is formed through his thoughts and descriptions, as Márquez adeptly uses his skills as a writer to penetrate the heart of the character while remaining an outside observer. We can feel his disdain and sadness, but it is not the only thing we see.
Essentially, Márquez wonderfully employs his clear writing style and inventive imagination for stories set in vivid villages with typically supernatural elements. Innocent
Eréndira and Other Stories
contains many moments of magical ideas treated as normal and everyday while concentrating on larger themes of death and loneliness.

Bibliography
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"Gabriel García Márquez - Facts."
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García Márquez, Gabriel. Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories
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Row, 1978. Print.