washes upon their shore does not frighten them nor do they reject him. Instead of being freakish for his size, he is ''the tallest, strongest, most virile and best built man they had ever seen." The drowned man, whom they come to call Esteban, has more ideal qualities than just the physical. He is compassionate, recognizing the anxiety that his size causes and possessing the awful knowledge that "the lady of the house looked for her most resistant chair and begged him, frightened to death, sit here." He feels shame at being such a bother to the villagers; had he known he was going to drown, "he would have looked for a more discreet place.'' While others might have turned on him for his unusual characteristics, the villagers not only show him kindness but actually embrace him. He becomes their model and they will better their village and their lives in his honor.

The villagers live in a land where mystical things can happen and where intuition and magic count for more than strict reality. Their partiality for the imaginative is apparent even before they are touched by Esteban, in the mothers's fears that "the wind would carry off their children." Their calm acceptance of the phenomenal, however, is most clearly apparent when they regard Esteban. He weighs almost as much as a horse "and they said to each other that maybe ... the water had gotten into his bones." He hardly fits inside the house, and "they thought that maybe the ability to keep on growing after death was part of the nature of certain drowned men." These comments on the nature of his size are not rationalizations; the villagers are not bothered by his size, they simply do not need to explain his physical state. Their comments are spoken as asides, noting unimportant yet interesting details.

Because the villagers do not spend their time wondering how Esteban came to exist, they can concentrate on what is important: the man. Looking in his face they see that ''he did not have the lonely look of other drowned men who came out of the sea or that haggard, needy look of men who drowned in rivers." When they realize that he will have to be dragged to his funeral (no one can carry him), they understand the shame and awkwardness his size caused him in life. Not only do they understand how Esteban feels, but they begin to understand a bit more about their own lives. As the women sit up all night, sewing an outfit for Esteban, ''it seemed to them that the wind had never been so steady nor the sea so restless ... and they supposed that the change had something to do with the dead man." Already their lives, fed by the "calm and bountiful" sea, are changing.

The lives of the villagers will continue to change over the next twenty-four hours and on into the future. To honor Esteban's memory, the villagers will build larger homes so that he can pass through freely without shame at his size. They will paint the houses bright colors and ''break their backs digging for springs among the stones and planting flowers on the cliffs." In the future, passengers on great oceanliners will smell the villagers's gardens and be told "that's Esteban's village." What Esteban's visit has made them realize is how terribly empty their lives had been. Though they knew that "they were no longer present, that they would never be," by making their home a place good enough for Esteban, they are enriching themselves as well.

The use of another element of magic realism helps justify the monumental effect Esteban had: the mythic. In the personage of Esteban are shades of heroes from different cultures and time periods. His very name, Spanish for Stephen, invokes St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr. Esteban also may recall Estevanico (a diminutive form of the name), an African slave who explored Florida and the Southwest United States in the 1500s. He was the first African many Indians had ever seen, and they thought he might be a god and gave him many gifts. As with Esteban, his appearance led him to be revered as something more than an ordinary man; just as the villagers would strive "to make Esteban's memory eternal," legends were passed down for generations, right until the present day, about Estevanico.

Esteban also unites the village and himself through a connection to different myths and mythical figures. The village women become as powerful as figures of Greek mythology when "sailors who heard [their] weeping ... went off course and people heard of one who had himself tied to the mainmast, remembering ancient fables about sirens." This allusion to Homer's Odyssey also brings to mind that epic's hero, Odysseus, who, during his ten-year voyage, washed up on the shore of several islands and effected sometimes radical changes on their inhabitants. Esteban is also tied to the ancient Aztec god Quetzalcoatl who arrived from the sea. He had a civilizing effect on the Aztec people, leading them from the sacrifice of others to self-sacrifice in order to achieve their goals. Because of his close tie with the sea, his statue in the Aztec capital showed him covered in snail shells and flowers, much like Esteban, who washed up on shore "covered with a crust of mud and scales." The defeated Quetzalcoatl left his people, again by the sea, but according to legend he returns periodically to bring about change and revolution. Esteban could very well be the villagers's personal Quetzalcoatl.

If all these references need to be interpreted in order to understand the story, what then is to be made of the subtitle ("A Tale for Children'') which sometimes accompanies the story? Perhaps it is not really necessary to know how the story works, only that it does work. It can exist as a fairy tale without drawing criticism for its lack of reality. As a children's story, it is allowed to simply entertain. The story may best be seen as presenting the multiple realities that are inherent to magic realism. Just as the villagers have to be open to possibilities in order to reap the benefits of Esteban's visit, so must readers suspend their disbelief.

Source: Rena Korb, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Had Garcia Marquez never put any of his novels to paper, his shorter fiction would have still gained him some niche in literary history. Already in 1967 the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti was to observe that "some of the stories gathered in Big Mama's Funeral can be considered among the most perfect instances of the genre ever written in Latin America." We might venture yet further and say that those pieces, along with the novella No One Writes to the Colonel and the stories collected in Innocent Erendira, put Garcia Marquez in the company of such acknowledged masters of short fiction as [Anton] Chekhov, [Thomas] Mann, [James] Joyce, [John] Cheever, or Grace Paley.

The author cites [Ernest] Hemingway as the chief influence on his own story writing. The admission is borne out by the pieces themselves, with their spare, minimal prose that captures life's little disturbances and moments of solitude, evokes major emotion in a snatch of dialogue or in the slightest of gestures. Garcia Marquez remarked in 1950 that "the North Americans ... are writing today's best short stories," and Hemingway in this regard served him as much as mentor as did [William] Faulkner and [Virginia] Woolf for his longer works. Particularly influential was Hemingway's ''iceberg'' theory of the short story—often cited by Garcia Marquez—whereby the author makes visible only one-seventh of what is to be communicated, the other six-sevenths lying implicitly beneath the narrative's surface.

The stories offer pleasures of a sort different from those we know from One Hundred Years of Solitude. They are miracles not of mythic sweep but of understatement, conjuring up as they do the subtle, small-scale, mostly interpersonal upsets and triumphs of common village folk—the sleepy priests, poolhall souses, provincial wheeler-dealers, troubled but stouthearted women, and the abandoned, the mismatched, or the bereaved. In later pieces, Garcia Marquez will emerge with his visionary side full-grown and include fantastical materials—a wizened angel or a ghost ship. But there is a key element never absent from the Colombian author's stories, be they "magical" or realistic: the climate of his world. Every one of these short pieces has at least a reference either to the intense daytime heat or the tropical rain and its effects on characters' lives (their slowness in mid-afternoon, their ill health in rainy season). The consummate craft of the narratives should also be noted: Garcia Marquez typically spends weeks or even months on a single short story, feeling pleased when completing just two lines in a day....

In "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,'' the only entity with a name is the eponymous cadaver, whom the villagers choose to call ''Esteban." (The Catholic church's first martyr, we may recall, was St. Stephen.) When his tall, strong, broad-shouldered, lifeless body is washed ashore near a seafaring hamlet of "twenty-odd houses," the irruption from another, remote, unknown world excites the romantic, myth-producing imaginations of the sad and isolated townsfolk. He strikes them as proud, ''the most virile and best-built man they had ever seen," and from there they infer for him the power to stop the winds and call fish from the sea. The women in particular fantasize about him, alive and polite as a fellow villager in their lives, and inasmuch as it is they who prepare his corpse for sea burial, they grow particularly attached to their ideas and images of him. The males by contrast get to feeling jealous and look forward to his being returned at last to the deep.

If the women's collective role in this story shows mythmaking's more specifically erotic side, in the ritual ocean burial the affective bonds are extended and "all the inhabitants of the village became kinsmen." Hints at Odysseus's adventure of the sirens help place the incident of Esteban within a larger ancestral continuum of seafaring fable. Through these intimations of a greater and more beautiful cosmos the villagers are reminded of "the desolation of their streets" and (by extension) of their lives. And so we probably can trust the omniscient narrator's prediction that the inhabitants, in response, will thence beautify and make fertile their hamlet, and give it some fame as "Esteban's village." In some of his best long narratives Garcia Marquez forged a kind of fantastical history; here we see him experimenting in turn with a fantastical anthropology, as it were, a ''folklore science-fiction" that speculates on the humbler origins and organizational powers of a commonly created and shared popular myth. Garcia Marquez the socialist well knows that the imagination and its dreams are as crucial a force in political life as is economic fact.

Source: Gene H. BellVillada, "The Master of Short Forms," in his Garcia Marquez' The Man and His Work, University of North Carolina Press, 1990, pp. 11936.

Since the publication in 1972 of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' penultimate collection of short stories [Leaf Storm and Other Stories], critics have been hard-pressed to analyze the enigmatic, fabulous tales that make up the group. Several stories are developed from the tension between the sea and the land, the latter almost always being a boring place inhabited by citizens of limited imagination. In several cases, unusual apparitions from the sea provoke traumatic explosions of imagination in one or many of the inhabitants of an otherwise staid region....

As a whole, the stories create a fabulous environment, and the Caribbean becomes as prodigious a sea as the Mediterranean was for Homer. Gradually the land areas around it become permeated with beings from other times and other civilizations. The original inhabitants are disturbed by the heroic characters, and at the end of the story, nothing is as it was before. Forced to see themselves and their world as they are, some natives seize the opportunity to change, so that their world begins to adjust itself to the heroic demands of the travelers from other realms.

One of the most enigmatic stories in the collection, ''El ahogado mas hermoso del mundo " [''The Handsomest Man in the World"], illustrates the manner in which Garcia Marquez utilizes a heroic figure to revolutionize mundane reality. To achieve the appropriate reaction from the reader to the disparate elements in the story, Garcia Marquez creates a constant tension between a small fishing village and the sea which borders it. The tension heightens as the story progresses, and it remains unresolved at the open-ended conclusion. The meaning of the story must be developed in the mind of the reader, for it is not readily apparent from the various elements of the plot.

As the story progresses, both the nature of the village and that of the drowned man who washes up on a nearby beach are gradually revealed. The village is small, and its few inhabitants live in houses rapidly constructed of boards. In this village devoid of beauty, patios are filled with rocks rather than with flowers. The physical poverty of the village functions as an objective correlative of the capacity of soul of its natives. There is hope, however, for the village does contain children, who welcome the drowned man to their village as one of their own.

As the drowned man first appears, floating in the sea, the children on the beach pretend that he might be an enemy ship or a whale. When at last he washes ashore, he turns out to be a dead man, all covered with marine animals and residue from shipwrecks. The children play "funeral" with him all afternoon, burying him in the sand, then digging him up again. Eventually an adult notices their unusual toy, gives a shout of alarm, and the men carry the drowned man to the nearest house.

The men react quite differently to the dead man. Although they do not doubt he is a man, they refuse to accept him as one of them. Worried that he may be from their village, they look from man to man and realize that they are complete. The rest of the story illustrates how ironic is Garcia Marquez' use of "complete" in this village. The men do notice the Homeric size of the stranger. He is heavy as a horse and will not fit into any house in the village. Leaving the body sprawled on the beach, the men leave to investigate his identity in nearby villages.

The women clean the body and, as they see the face for the first time, they are, literally, breathless. The drowned man is the most perfect being they have ever seen, and their poor imagination cannot accommodate him. They proceed, in a scene reminding the reader of the remotest, matriarchal period of man's past, to surround him in a circle on the beach. As the usually calm sea roars and seems anxious, the women sew clumsy garments for the drowned man. Fantasizing about his sexual prowess, the women indulge in a series of mental voyages: "Andaban extraviadas por esos dedalos de fantasia...."

Since the women have exercised their imagination rarely in the past, they must proceed from the known (their village) to the miraculous (the drowned man's effect on the village). They imagine how their village would have to become if a being as fabulous as the ahogado were to live there. They compare their boring lives with husbands who fish every night to the spectacular possibilities provided by such a splendid man ("el mejor armado que habian visto jamas"). The drowned man would have magical powers to call fish from the water, cause water to gush from rocks, and to plant flowers even in a rock wall.

Not content with an anonymous dead man, the women name him Stephen. After he has been dressed, curiously enough, as a huge baby, and given a martyr's name, the sea calms, as though satisfied. The women take their second mental voyage, speculating about the personality of Stephen. Because of his size, he would have been uncomfortable in their village. The women realize how innately hostile the group is to anything different, and they fear he would have been considered "el bobo grande" or "el tonto hermoso." By this time Stephen has assumed so much personality that he hardly seems dead, and the women cover his face so that the rising sun will not bother him.

Returning from a frustrating night, the men do not understand the fascination of the huge body for their wives. They jealously fear comparison with him and only want to throw him back into the sea with an anchor tied to his ankles. After they see Stephen's face, however, his beauty convinces them of the sincerity of his manner of being (which Garcia Marquez ironically twists into "modo deestar.")

The funeral rites for Stephen are resplendent with flowers. The village elects honorary parents and other relatives for Stephen, so that through this ritual everyone is now related to everyone else. After his body is returned to the sea, Stephen's memory causes the village to rebuild houses, plant roses, and paint with bright colors. Even more important, the villagers now realize that they are incomplete and always will be. The faculty of soul which they had so dreadfully lacked has begun to develop, however, and imagination, stimulated by so powerful a trauma as Stephen's visit, can hardly be prevented from expanding....

The women attribute to the giant the personality of dignified arrogance, a characteristic which reminds one of Zeus and almost all the Greek heroes. The highly charged eroticism provoked by Stephen's size is also reminiscent of the amorous adventures of Zeus, as well as of the sexual trials of Odysseus. The women's thoughts revolve around the Homeric size of Stephen's (hypothetical) bed, and Garcia Marquez slyly directs the reader's memory back to the close of the Odyssey, as Penelope uses the characteristics of Odysseus' bed to ascertain the identity of the stranger who claims to be her husband....

Stephen's god-like qualities are constantly reinforced by his relationship to the sea. The Caribbean usually is calm in the area of the village, but on the Tuesday night the women spend sewing around Stephen on the beach, they notice that the sea had never seemed so distressed. The empathy between Stephen and the anxious sea becomes prophetic. Stephen is a product of the sea, whether he is a man or a god, and the sea that produced him will receive him again. The cyclical nature of this relationship reveals itself in Stephen's strange clothes. The women find it difficult to construct clothing large enough for the giant, so that his apparel is amazingly like that of a baby (a ''sietemesino"). It is as if the brief period in the village provides Stephen with a chance to reincarnate himself before he returns to the sea for another voyage.

The funeral ceremony provides Garcia Marquez with the last ritual in the story. The flowers and the wailing of the women give a peculiarly primitive aspect to the funeral, reiterating that grandness within simplicity that marks Beowulf's funeral and the many leave-takings in the Iliad. The storyteller ironically twists the llanto into an alluring melody, as he relates that ''Algunos marineros que oyeron el llanto a la distancia perdieron la certeza del rumbo, y se supo de uno que se hizo amarrar al palo mayor, recordando antiguas fatmlas de sirenas." This last allusion connects Stephen's funeral to Odysseus' trial with Circe and, simultaneously, suggests the power of art to transform reality, to create beauty from sadness.

A constant feature of Garcia Marquez' style has been his fusion of Greek, Spanish, and American literary models and mythology. The most exotic aspects of Stephen's visit to the village correlate with the widely disseminated myth of Quetzalcoatl, the pre-Columbian god worshiped by several tribes of Central America and Mexico. Like Stephen, Quetzalcoatl arrived from the sea and brought a new civilizing influence upon the various forms of culture which he encountered. A new vision of beauty, of human relationships, and of time itself derived from Quetzalcoatl's emphasis upon self-sacrifice rather than the commonly accepted sacrifice of others. Indigenous resistance to Quetzalcoatl's revolutionary influence took the form of a magician, who, in the course of his epic struggle against the peaceful god, was able to make dead bodies incredibly heavy. Stephen, it will be remembered, seemed impossibly heavy to the men who carried his body from the shore. Within Aztec mythology, Quetzalcoatl is at times called Ehecatl, the lord of the wind; it is therefore not surprising that the wind should rage and the sea be troubled on the night of Stephen's appearance....

In his combination of Homeric and modern aspects of Odysseus' personality with pre-Columbian heroic constructs, Garcia Marquez creates still another embodiment of the archetype of man's refusal to accept reality as it is. His villagers, incited by a lively dead man, completely change from within, and their new self is reflected in their village, famous for the legend of Stephen, the martyr whose death stimulates new life.

Source: Mary E. Davis, ''The Voyage Beyond the Map: 'El Ahogado Mas Hermoso Del Mundo,'" in Kentucky Romance Quarterly, Vol. 26, No 1, 1979, pp. 25-33.