Handsomest Drowned Man In The World

The idea of a change in perception had me reflecting on memories from my childhood. I thought of the times spent with my family together and it wasn’t long before I realized just how much my perception of a nuclear family and marriage had changed based on the revelation of a memory I had almost forgotten. My parents before separation. When recalling memories of Christmases and trips we spent as a nuclear family, I was brought back to how things used to be. It was short lived after a recent dispute occurred between my parents bringing me back to the present. I realized, as I witnessed the argument ensue between them, that how I perceived them during my childhood up to today has changed drastically. My perceptions are constantly changing due to different events that take place that altering my opinions on certain topics.

Though written in a very light and simple manner, the poem comes across as something very profound, laden with meaning through its incongruities. The persona, wanting to see something, often goes to the well and looks down at the water to see it. This certain search below the water's surface can be compared to man's search beneath the human experience for meaning, for certainty.

Although this is a short poem, there are so many different meanings that can come from the piece. With different literary poetic devices such as similes, imagery, and symbolism different people take away different things from the poem. One of my classmates saw it as an extended metaphor after searching for a deeper connection with the author. After some research on the author, we came to learn that the

Immediately revealing the central theme of the poem as well as alluding to the narrator’s apparent self-doubt, the first stanza is an imperative aspect of this piece. The speaker begins by stating that she has “been thinking at random on the universe, or rather, how nothing in the universe is random”. So commences her journey to solve the question:

While, Esteban who is just an ordinary person and at the same time a dead man, was portrayed as a good looking guy, We can see this in paragraph 4, “Not only was he the tallest and strongest, most virile, and best built man they had ever seen, but even though they were looking at him there was no room for him in their imagination”. What’s ironic here is even though he is a drowned dead man who is supposed to be portrayed as a man full of anguish, he is still portrayed as a good looking as peaceful looking man. And even though he is already, many women still fantasize him.

Although both short stories, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” and “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World”, were written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, there are many other differences between the two tales. Both stories were about men who arrived in foreign places and how these men were treated by the people who found them. The old man from the story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” and Esteban from the story “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” are apparently opposites of each other.

In summary, the comparisons of Esteban to Jesus Christ and the Christian faith are very interesting. It is also unclear if this is Marquez’s original intent. Does the writer mean to suggest that religious fervor is built on fantasy and we, the villagers, are naïve? There is also no way to really know Esteban’s true character. Is he the valiant warrior they dreamed of? If his return were possible, is he truly someone they would want to rule and

The Creation is a poem about how God created the earth. This poem suggests a different perspective of the story of creation, in a way that even a young kid would know how God created this earth and human beings. The reason of creation is to eliminate God’s loneliness which gives an invigorating and appealing aura to the poem.

The poem contains two stanzas with two different settings. One might not know much about the first stanza; however, in the second one the speaker is next to an ocean, perhaps, at a beach. So, while the first stanza symbolizes the mindset of the speaker, the inner dream, the second stanza symbolizes the outer dream which is what we see; life. The poem

Magical realism is a genre that portrays both reality and fantasy. As defined by Faris (2004) in Ordinary enchantments, magical realism is a genre of writing that includes an irreducible element of magic and details that suggest phenomenon (Faris, 2004, p. 7). He describes the irreducible element as: “…something we cannot explain according to the laws of the universe as they have been formulated in Western empirically based discourse…” (Faris, 2004, p. 7). In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story, The handsomest drowned man in the world, the facets of magical realism are rife. He uses magical realism to enchant the reader. The story is of a small cliff-side and coastal community

During this poem the man is forced to kill another man and the repetition of “because” implies hesitation and uncertainty about why he shot the man. He tries to reassure himself by saying “just so: my

speaker of the poem uses reason in the same manner as those that he claims

“The relationship between the energies of the inquiring mind that an intelligent reader brings to the poem and the poem’s refusal to yield a single comprehensive interpretation enacts vividly the everlasting intercourse between the human mind, with its instinct to organise and harmonise, and the baffling powers of the universe about it.”

The reader must participate in the making of the poem or story by digging the structure out and create coherence out of the seeming incoherence. Therefore, the search for meaning, even if it does not succeed, becomes meaningful itself.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World” achieves powerfully fantastic story-telling. As the story begins, we are met with the discovery of a floating corpse at sea that shores itself on an unassuming village’s beach. The drowned man is not of the village, which quickly piques the villagers curiosities. The villagers acknowledged him as a stranger among them, “…when they found the drowned man they simply had to look at one another to see that they were all there.” No one had seen him before.