In his short stories, Gabriel Garcia Marquez uses the treatment of strangers to highlight how many characters are treated solely based on their physical appearance, even if we never learn their natural characteristics. A charming man forms the short story The most handsome drowned man in the world, but we do not know his personality or even his name, yet people admire him based on his physical characteristics. Throughout the story, there is a range of subjects that are addressed. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and metamorphosis is two of the main themes. Both concepts play an essential role in the plot’s development. These themes also build on one another and create a moral to the story. As to grasp the narrative goal, the essay will focus on two main themes: metamorphosis and beauty in the eyes of the beholder.
Throughout the novel, the subject of beauty being in the eye of the beholder appears in numerous forms. The characters’ perspectives on the drowned are entirely different throughout the story. The kids first regard him as a whale, then as an enemy ship, and lastly as a toy. The grownups believe him as a deluged foreigner who has invaded their regime. However, as the women clean him, they grow in wonder and eventually sympathy for him, naming him Esteban. The drowned man is embraced by the entire community, bringing the village people together. Garcia Márquez gradually reveals this transformation through the characters’ behaviors, emphasizing how they begin to reckon a narrative and an identity into this stranger, in the end growing to consider him as someone adored and magical. Garcia Márquez suggests it is human frailty to build a personal story about individuals and events, both in levels and their own lives.
Transformation is another recurring subject in this novel. The drowned man in the novel symbolizes a change in this particular society. The village itself is represented as dry, barren, and lifeless at the novel’s start. On the arrival of the drowned man, the women’s imaginations run wild, believing that he is a person who can make flowers grow on cliffs (Marquez 538). The town’s idea of possibilities begins to burgeon as its imagination, admiration, and empathy for the drowned guy blossom. The women speculate of a future in which their houses will be covered with paints, the cliffs will blossom with flowers, and outsiders will stop to awe the beauty of their village.
It is worth noting that Garcia Márquez never implies that the locals were unhappy prior to the arrival of the drowning person. Instead, the man’s unexplained presence gives the people a sense of possibilities that they didn’t have before. The drowned man’s oddity inspires them to create something they have never done before. They believe in what may have been an unlikely future because Estaban appears so unlikely. They are forced to confront the prospect of improbable events due to man’s unusual character. Simultaneously, the transformation is due to the townspeople’s projections on the drowned man. He is a character that is never seen alive in the novel, and his origins and arrival are both unknown. As a result, he acts as a blank canvas on which the townspeople might imprint their hopes and desires. Without having done anything, the drowned man acts as a catalyst to widen the villagers’ scope of transforming their village.
In conclusion, the two focal themes have played a prominent role in developing the story. In the subject that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, it outlines that the way we view things is interrelated to how we feel. How we yield or perceive life is entirely on our mindset. The drowned man transforms the villagers’ minds and the whole image of the village. The individuals imagine a transformed town and outsiders stopping by to admire. The novel contends that a truly magnificent person can change others, inspire them to better, and make them remarkable.
Work Cited
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. “The Most Handsome Drowned Man in the World.” An Introduction to Fiction. Eds. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. New York: Pearson Longman, 2007. 536-540.
I hereby pledge that the information in this essay is my own original work and that all phrases or quotes taken from other sources have been correctly identified via quotation marks/in-text citation.