43 pages • 1 hour read
Gabriel García MárquezA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
“The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish.”
This quote describes the story’s setting and sets the tone of Pelayo’s life before finding the old man. He has a sick newborn, his home is filled with crabs, and the rain outside has not stopped. The colorful language contrasts with the dreary scene it evokes, imbuing it with beauty in the same way that magical realism draws out the fantastical in the everyday.
“He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings.”
This sentence is emblematic of García Márquez’s writing style, which Rabassa has also captured in his translation. Both versions contain many commas and long, flowing sentences. In this passage, the audience, much like Pelayo himself, waits in suspense to discover why the old man is stuck in the mud.
His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked, were forever entangled in the mud. They looked at him so long and so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him familiar.”
This moment foreshadows just how familiar Pelayo and his family will become with the old man as the story progresses. It is also one of the first clear examples of the story’s magical realism: the fantastic wings appear alongside the mundaneness of dirty mud. Notably, the man is “uncanny” both as a man (because of his wings) and as an angel (because his wings’ shabby appearance doesn’t correspond to conventional angelic
By Gabriel García Márquez
Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon
Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon
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Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
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Death Constant Beyond Love
Death Constant Beyond Love
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Eyes of a Blue Dog
Eyes of a Blue Dog
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In Evil Hour
In Evil Hour
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Innocent Erendira
Innocent Erendira
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Leaf Storm
Leaf Storm
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Love in the Time of Cholera
Love in the Time of Cholera
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Memories of My Melancholy Whores
Memories of My Melancholy Whores
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News of a Kidnapping
News of a Kidnapping
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No One Writes To The Colonel
No One Writes To The Colonel
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Of Love And Other Demons
Of Love And Other Demons
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude
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One Of These Days
One Of These Days
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Strange Pilgrims
Strange Pilgrims
Gabriel García Márquez
The Autumn of the Patriarch
The Autumn of the Patriarch
Gabriel García Márquez, Transl. Gregory Rabassa
The General in His Labyrinth
The General in His Labyrinth
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The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World
The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World
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The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
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