No One Writes to the Colonel (Masterplots II: American Fiction Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Gabriel García Márquez
- First Published: 1961
- Type of Plot: Ironic realism
- Time of Work: October to December, 1956
- Setting: An unnamed village in Colombia
- Principal Characters: The colonel, His wife, Don Sabas, The Doctor
- Genres: Long fiction, Magical Realism
- Subjects: 1950’s, Poverty or poor people, Small-town life, Military life or service, South America or South Americans, Retirement
- Locales: Colombia
The Novel
The plot of this short novel is quite simple. The elderly and impoverished colonel has been waiting for fifteen years to receive a pension check for his service in the army. The cultural context of the story is during what is known as la violencia, a civil war between liberals and conservatives in Colombia that lasted from the late 1940’s into the 1960’s. Nine months previous to the opening of the story, the colonel’s son, Agustín, had been killed at a cockfight for distributing secret political literature. The colonel is torn between his desire to keep...
[The entire page is 2119 words long]
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