Student Question
How does "Eyes of a Blue Dog" pose questions about the meaning of loneliness and isolation?
Quick answer:
In the short story "Eyes of a Blue Dog" by Gabriel García Márquez, the main questions that arise are whether the narrator's loneliness and isolation have caused him to create the woman in the dream out of his imagination or whether she is real. Readers also question whether the narrator's emotional coldness has caused him to become so lonely that he creates a companion that he can meet in his sleep.
The entire story "Eyes of a Blue Dog" by Gabriel García Márquez takes place within a dream. The narrator is a man who has been dreaming of a certain woman for a long time. She claims to have been dreaming about him, too, although it is impossible to determine whether this is true or it is all part of the logic and information formulated by the dream. She claims that when she and the man first met, he created a phrase, "eyes of a blue dog," by which they might remember each other when they woke up. When she is awake, she wanders around telling people the phrase and writing it in various places. The narrator, however, confesses that when he wakes up, he cannot remember the phrase at all.
One question that the story raises is whether the man has imagined the woman as a result of...
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his isolation and loneliness or whether the woman truly exists and is trying to find him. Recurrent dreams of the same person certainly seem to suggest that the man is generating them out of his loneliness, but then another unspoken question for readers is whether the dreams are really recurring or whether the encounter only happens once and the recurring nature of the tryst is part of the complex imaginary dream-logic. It is significant that according to the woman, they are unable to touch each other or the narrator will "ruin everything." This is another intimation that maybe the woman does not exist at all except as a product of the narrator's loneliness and frustration. She also says that "someone is dreaming about this room and revealing my secrets." It is the narrator, of course, who is doing this. When he turns away from her and says that he can still see her, it may be because the only place that she exists is within his mind. She describes herself as an object of metal and hollow inside, another indication that she might not really exist.
Marquez also implies that the narrator's isolation is somehow related to a state of emotional coldness. We see this by the woman in the dream continually attempting to warm herself at the lamp. The man may be so incapable of real emotional warmth that he conjures up the fantasy of the woman in his dreams as compensation.