The Handsomest Drowned Man by Gabriel Garcia Inspires the Villagers’ New Vision

Life is full of obstacles. The Old man has many, but chooses to push through life. One of his obstacles is the fact that he lives a lonely life. Santiago lost his wife and never remarried. He has no children or family to comfort and support him. The only companion Santiago has is the local boy. The boy is fond of Santiago, but his family is not. The boy’s parent do not think Santiago id good for the boy because the man is unlucky. The boy brings Santiago food and companionship. Even though the boy is a friend to Santiago he still has an empty part that should hold family. The old man continues through life with no wife or children and on to his next journey with the sea.

A man is limited physically by a rope tied around his hands and feet. Villagers are limited intellectually where none of them have traveled around the world or they have not seen any of the natural beauties and diversities that the world has to offer. One is limited quite simply and clearly while the other simply cannot fathom the awe-inspiring sight bestowed upon them. These are the unlikely scenarios that confront readers of “The Bound Man,” by Ilse Aichinger, and “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,” by Garcia Marquez. "The Bound Man" is a story about a man who awoke to find himself stuck in a predicament where he has been tied up, knocked out, and left alone in the wilderness with nothing other than the clothes on his back.

    Children are beautiful because they possess the quality of innocence. In Gary Soto’s autobiographical narrative “A Summer Life”, he recalls a boyhood experience that left him striped of his innocence and purity in the form of a glaring pie tin. Many different literary elements such as imagery, diction and repetition are used to recreate the experience of his guilty six-year old self.

Grading Guidelines: Answers will vary. A complete answer would look like the following: The villagers in “The Handsomest Man in the World” are compelled by their belief in a man they do not really know to bring about change in their village. They design their houses and landscape in honor of this drowned man, Esteban, so that his spirit will approve and feel at home in their community.

Many of the people living in the village have come from a variety of lives before moving into the community. Some old, some new, and often have been alone most of their life.

Marquez refers to the old man as decrepit, smelly, and with no angelic divine powers (Marquez 357), however, he uses symbolism to represent the old man as a strange creature unlike others, and a miracle that comes to help Pelayo’s household; by recovering their newborn child from illness and help them become rich. Likewise, the objective of symbolism in this story is to show Marquez’s own opinions of different and unknown ideas that will benefit people from its

Analysis The author paints a picture in the readers’ mind of a nice and beautiful day in the village. Seeing this beautiful setting might cause to reader to expect happy and exciting events to follow.

The world of Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” exists through the mostly unemotional eyes of the character Nick. Stemming from his reactions and the suppression of some of his feelings, the reader gets a sense of how Nick is living in a temporary escape from society and his troubles in life. Despite the disaster that befell the town of Seney, this tale remains one of an optimistic ideal because of the various themes of survival and the continuation of life. Although Seney itself is a wasteland, the pine plain and the campsite could easily be seen as an Eden, lush with life and ripe with the survival of nature.

In the story, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez intertwines the supernatural with the natural in an amazing manner. This essay analyzes how Marquez efficiently utilizes an exceptional style and imaginative tone that requests the reader to do a self-introspection on their life regarding their responses to normal and abnormal events.

So when the men returned with the news that the drowned man was not from the neighboring villages either, the women felt an opening of jubilation in the midst of their tears. 'Praise the Lord,' they sighed, he's ours!'” (Marquez, 1972, p. 3). The town falls in love with Esteban, treating him like one of their own, but even better. The women imagine what his life was like before, being so much bigger then everyone else and being more handsome then the rest. They make clothes and jewelry for him and imagine what their lives would be like having him as a husband. The villagers really seem to come together in their admiration of Esteban. Their faith strongly exemplifies the magical realism elements in this story, seeing as normally a reader would expect society to not so readily except something that is so unnatural and uncommon to them.

Due to the author’s use of figurative language in comparing the individual's appearance to a dry river bed, the reader can observe a more precise

Collectively, these literary images go to describe a young ethnic man, probably of Latin descent, who lives with his mother in a poverty stricken area. The careful recitation of instruction given to the younger man seems to demonstrate an intricate knowledge the narrators has accrued from both predecessors and experience. Singularly, this part of the story is very powerful in that it shows a young man having to hide who he is and where he comes from in an effort to seem appealing to women, and speaks volumes about the deception that both genders go through all in name of the chase.

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.

The title of Gabriel García Márquez’s short story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” says it all about the character who will turn the life of Pelayo, a simple villager, upside down when he discovers the mystery man in his backyard. The story demonstrates the coexistence of cruelty and compassion within humans and the way they react towards what’s considered as different.

The people of the village seem to be enthralled with the dead man. They are all in amazement of how tall he is, how heavy his body seems to be. They are all curious about the mysterious man and where he could’ve came from, what could’ve happened to lead to his demise. The focus on their fascination with the man shows how odd we as a society can be at times. Everyone in society is, though somewhat scared, highly intrigued by the notion of death. It’s something that we all have to face at some point in life. It’s scary, but we for some reason are so interested in it when we are forced to acknowledge it.