she realizes, after watching José ignore her and go back to his routine cleaning activities, that he will never understand and that she is alone. ‘‘The woman stayed on her stool, silent, concentrating, watching the man’s movements with an air of declining sadness.’’

The characters in each story follow the respective style of their story’s pacing. In ‘‘The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock,’’ the characters are softer and as a result, the reader is drawn to them. This is especially true with the woman prostitute. Although the woman has a hard edge to her voice at times, which matches the hard life she has been living, she is not so far gone that she can’t speak ‘‘with a tender, soft, different voice.’’ In fact, even when she looks like she’s going to get violent, as when she grabs José ‘‘by the hair,’’ it is still ‘‘a gesture of obvious tenderness.’’ These characterizations help to offset the idea that this woman has committed murder, which she alludes to with such phrases as ‘‘‘you’d defend me if I killed him, right?’’’ and ‘‘‘Would you tell a lie for me, José? Seriously.’’’ These allusions are coupled with the woman’s ‘‘hypothetical’’ scenario, where an unnamed woman kills a man because he ‘‘‘isn’t decent’’’ and has taken advantage of her, to the point where ‘‘‘he disgusts her so much that she could die, and she knows that the only way to end it all is to stick a knife in under him.’’’

In spite of these strong hints of murder, the reader is still encouraged to feel sympathy for the woman through the descriptions of her. As the author writes, she has a ‘‘face gilded by a premature autumnal grain,’’ ‘‘flat, sad breasts,’’ and hair ‘‘greased with cheap, thick Vaseline.’’ It is hard for readers to condemn a character when they feel sorry for her and the hard, shameful life that she has lived, which is what García Márquez intends with this kind of intentionally sympathetic characterization.

The men in ‘‘The Killers,’’ however, are just that—cold, unfeeling murderers who do not inspire sympathy. These professional hitmen, like the story’s pacing, are hard and rough. They are rude from the start, when they try to order a couple of items during lunch hours that are not served until dinner, which is an hour away. ‘‘‘Oh, to hell with the clock,’’’ one of them says. The men’s demeanor does not improve as they eat their food, and George tries to appease the two by agreeing with a joke they have made about everybody coming to his restaurant to ‘‘‘eat the big dinner’’’:

‘That’s right,’ George said. ‘So you think that’s right?’ Al asked George. ‘Sure.’ ‘You’re a pretty bright boy, aren’t you?’ ‘Sure,’ said George ‘Well, you’re not,’ said the other little man. ‘Is he, Al?’ ‘He’s dumb,’ said Al.

The two men only get more antagonistic and condescending as the story goes on, and they slowly reveal their plan, telling Nick, the only customer in the place, to ‘‘‘go around on the other side of the counter with your boy friend.’’’ At this point, Al takes Nick in the back and ties him up with Sam, the black cook, while the other man, Max, keeps watch on George while waiting for their target to come in. George does as Al and Max asks, and lies to his customers when they come in the door, saying the cook stepped out and that they will have to come back later to eat. Max commends George on the handling of the situation, still using the condescending nickname, ‘‘‘bright boy,’’’ but Al pipes up from the kitchen, saying, ‘‘‘He knew I’d blow his head off.’’’

Through this stark characterization, Hemingway paints the two hitmen as men who really enjoy their work, men who are beyond a reader’s sympathy. They like the power that killing gives to them, and flaunt it by making fun of people and making violent threats. In this story, however, the killers don’t get to hit their target in the restaurant, because Ole Andreson does not show up at six o’clock like he usually does. Although the two killers argue about whether or not to kill George, Nick, and Sam, they finally decide to let them go and leave; in the process, they tell George that he’s ‘‘‘got a lot of luck,’’’ and that he ‘‘‘ought to play the races, bright boy,’’’ leaving George with one last condescending phrase.

After the killers leave, Nick follows shortly after to go warn Ole Andreson. Nick’s leaving, and the resulting expansion in the setting as the narration follows him, helps to illustrate the third major point of distinction between the two stories—the difference in setting. Although both stories take place in a small restaurant, in ‘‘The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock,’’ the setting is deliberately confined within José’s small restaurant, where the story concerns only José and the woman, one of his regulars: ‘‘The clock hadn’t finished striking six when a woman entered, as on every day at that hour.’’

At the story’s end, unlike Hemingway’s killers, the woman is still talking to José—the action never leaves the restaurant. José and the woman exist in their own little world. Even when a customer comes in, he doesn’t say hello to the two people, he merely goes to a table and sits, ‘‘silent, waiting in the corner.’’ With this focus on the two characters, García Márquez’s story takes on almost dream-like qualities. This is unlike Hemingway’s story, where there are several characters who come and go, and conversations take place between different people in different places. In ‘‘The Killers,’’ the world is anything but a dream. Instead, the harsh pacing of the story, the cold attitude of the hitmen, and their overt references to violence make the tale very realistic, in an extremely gritty way.

Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on ‘‘The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock,’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

Critics have long noted the influences of many modern fiction writers on Gabriel García Márquez, especially in the Colombian author’s handling of the passage of time and in the depiction of reality in his stories. In Twayne’s World Authors Series Online, for example, Raymond L. Williams credits García Márquez’s reading during the 1940s of German novelist and short story writer Franz Kafka with his discovery ‘‘that literature can not only reflect reality but also permit the invention of reality; fiction can not only present moral problems in social contexts but also place into question the matter of reality itself.’’ Deborah Cohn, in her article in College Literature, notes that ‘‘García Márquez joined with many of his fellow Latin American authors in embracing [William] Faulkner as one of their own.’’ Indeed, many critics have found parallels between the author from the American South and García Márquez, not the least of which is their shared interest in how time passes. ‘‘García Márquez’s debt to Faulkner’s treatment of time is evident,’’ comments Cohn.

Cohn also mentions in her article that García Márquez’s ‘‘notions of time’’ are similar to those of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who depicted time ‘‘as a past which creeps up on and encompasses the present and future . . . [and] a never completed movement towards the realization of potential.’’ She also notes, however, that in some of his work, García Márquez adopts a view of time that is ‘‘diametrically opposed to that of Bergson’’ but that appealed to Faulkner, who created ‘‘characters who are paralyzed in historical time,’’ unable to move beyond traumatic events. Both of these concepts of time infuse García Márquez’s 1950 short story ‘‘The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock.’’ Time does, indeed, seem to creep up on and encompass the futures of both José and the prostitute, but just as firmly, time and reality trap them and make them unable to move forward. García Márquez experiments with both the events in his story and the characters to shift time and reality.

‘‘The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock’’ is one of García Márquez’s first stories, written during a period in which, according to Williams, the author was beginning to establish his identity as a writer. ‘‘The first stories, as has been suggested, were more important as a symbolic beginning than for their purely artistic merit,’’ notes Williams. In this story, García Márquez is experimenting with the use of time, signaling his interest in having realistic situations co-exist alongside an invented reality in which time is nonlinear. His efforts to manipulate time and reality in some of the early stories set the ground work for the magic realism that has brought him so much fame and a Nobel Prize for literature. (Magic realism is a style of literature popularized in the 1960s in Latin America that combines ordinary events and characters with fantasy and dream-like features.)

At first glance, the story reads as a very straightforward piece of realistic fiction: a prostitute arrives at six in the evening at José’s restaurant, just as she has been doing for some time. Her cool, flirtatious conversation with José, along with her request that he accept the idea that she arrived at the restaurant earlier than she actually did, progressively reveals that she has most likely murdered one of her customers.

The story’s minimalist setting and mood recall Edward Hopper’s 1942 painting Nighthawks, a hyper- realistic illustration of an isolated diner in a gritty urban setting. Similar to García Márquez’s story, Hopper’s painting appears simplistic in its presentation. But, as with the story, time in the painting seems to have stopped for a moment. Because Hopper does not include a door into or out of the diner in the painting, the four occupants look as if they are sealed inside the restaurant by its large, smooth windows. Time stands still, and the customers and counterman are trapped in a moment.

The atmosphere found in Hopper’s painting pervades the tale of José and the prostitute, whom José refers to as ‘‘the queen.’’ Like the painting, García Márquez’s story seems fairly clear-cut, at least until the gathering weight of the author’s use of time as a narrative technique is fully felt in the story’s final action, when the prostitute asks that the reality of her arrival at the diner be altered yet again. Throughout the story, the prostitute is preoccupied with the distinction between when she truly arrived at the diner and when she wishes she had arrived. José offers her steak, but what she really wants is to be able to recapture a piece of time that has vanished.

Each day’s interaction between José and the prostitute is the same: she walks into his restaurant at exactly six o’clock, and he cooks her a free steak dinner. On the day of the story, however, the prostitute declares, ‘‘‘Today’s different,’’’ and tries to explain why she does not want her usual meal. José’s protests to the contrary, she insists, ‘‘‘I didn’t come at six today, that’s why it’s different, José.’’’ She seeks to change reality, in a sense, when she declares that she arrived fifteen minutes before six o’clock, the hour of her actual arrival. ‘‘‘I’ve got a quarter of an hour that says I’ve been here,’’’ she maintains.

While this early story may not be one of García Márquez’s great achievements, his careful choice of the story’s two characters contributes to his efforts to experiment with time and reality. Here he introduces two ordinary people with unexceptional histories—two people who have collected many hours, days, and years upon which their present days and their futures rest. The prostitute is no longer young and beautiful: when José leans over to light the prostitute’s cigarette, he notices ‘‘the beginning of her twilight breast.’’ José has, for many years ‘‘put on his daily comedy of a hard-working man,’’ wiping the same spot on the counter over and over again whenever a customer enters his restaurant. Their lives have been unglamorous and unspectacular— just the kind of lives that provide a perfect foil, or ground, for García Márquez’s bits of unreality and fantasy.

José and the prostitute attempt to adjust their reality by supposing certain scenarios and participating in a kind of role-playing. Not only does the prostitute ask José to alter time for her, but they both play with the idea that they are lovers and share a past and future with each other. When discussing how he would give her ‘‘‘a whole day and the night that goes with it’’’ just to see her happy, he admits out loud that he loves her—so much so that he would not go to bed with her, distinguishing himself from the other men she knows. Then José goes one step further in his role-playing as her lover, telling the prostitute that he would ‘‘‘kill the man that goes with you.’’’ Suddenly there are two murders: the actual murder committed by the queen, and the imaginary murder that José would commit in some other reality, if things were different.

The couple becomes so involved in their conversation about José’s professed love and whether he would kill another man for the prostitute that they create a world of their own, apart from reality. ‘‘The conversation had reached an exciting density,’’ writes García Márquez. The prostitute’s face was ‘‘almost stuck up against the man’s healthy, peaceful face, as he stood motionless, as if bewitched by the vapor of the words.’’ At this moment, time does stand still, and the couple is sealed off from the reality of who they are and what the prostitute has done. She even strokes his arm. The ‘‘vapor’’ clears only when the prostitute suddenly laughs, as if she is waking up from a dream only to realize the absurdity of José’s assertion that he would kill for her. ‘‘‘How awful, José,’’’ she says, yanking the two of them back to the present moment by teasingly announcing, ‘‘‘Who would have known that behind the fat and sanctimonious man who never makes me pay . . . there lurks a murderer.’’’ José is hurt and embarrassed by her response to his drift into a fantasy world and accuses the prostitute of drinking.

The prostitute plays with possibilities and alternate realities just as much as José does. For example, she uses his real name, José, until he mentions that he loves her. Then she begins calling him by another name, Pepillo; his pretending to be a man who would kill propels them both into another reality and a possible series of events requiring an alternate identity. Later in the story, she presents the reality of her committing murder as a scenario just as imaginary as José’s fantasy about killing a man for her. If José would kill a man who slept with her, she asks him, certainly he would defend her if she killed that same man? When José becomes alarmed, the queen assures him that she was simply talking to ‘‘amuse’’ herself, and José—despite his recent proclamations to the contrary—denies ever having considered killing anyone.

Both José and the prostitute are trapped by past events, unable to move forward. García Márquez underlines this feature by concluding the story with the prostitute asking José for just a bit more time, for her alibi. When José acts as if he doesn’t understand her—as if he hasn’t been present for the past thirty minutes’ discussion of love and murder and what he would do for her—she closes the story with the words, ‘‘‘Don’t be foolish, José. Just remember that I’ve been here since five-thirty.’’’

The prostitute’s final appeal echoes her first request for fifteen minutes and her second request for an additional five minutes, raising the question of just how far back in time she will want to go. How much more time will she ask for to provide herself with an alibi? Is she looking to go so far back into her history that she will rewrite her life and no longer be the tough, aging prostitute? By continuing to regress further into her past, the prostitute expresses the concept of time that García Márquez borrows from Faulkner, in which a character cannot escape the past but is held in check by it and prevented from moving forward. Even though the prostitute claims that she is planning to leave town (in an attempt to move forward), her desire for more time and an alternate reality seem to keep pushing her backwards. García Márquez closes his story with the image of a woman sitting in a diner, moving backwards because time and reality will not let her do otherwise. Her talk of leaving town, then, is another fantasy, no more real than the dream of her and José becoming lovers and of him committing murder for her.

Source: Susan Sanderson, Critical Essay on ‘‘The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock,’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

In ‘‘The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock,’’ Gabriel García Márquez invites his reader into a private exchange between two people who enjoy a strange sort of familiarity. José, the restaurant owner, has ‘‘almost come to acquire a degree of intimacy’’ with the woman who visits his establishment each evening at six o’clock. Both are lonely figures and because of their loneliness they share a certain bond. As an onlooker and eavesdropper to the scene described and to their conversation, the reader of the story is suddenly privy to the details of their lives and their unusual relationship. With very little description on the part of the narrator, the reader learns about José, the woman, and something shocking that has transpired that evening. The reader comes to know what has happened from ‘‘reading between the lines’’ and from picking up on clues from the two characters’ conversation.

At the same time, José and the woman have a conversation in which they must pick up on each other’s clues and read between the lines as they talk to each other. However, it is not really clear whether each truly understands what the other is trying to say. The story thus is an interesting study in the complex nature of communication and in the way people relate to each other. García Márquez explores these issues as they are played out between the characters in his tale as well as between author and reader in the artificial construct of the short story.

The reader gleans over the course of the story, by listening to the two characters, that the woman, ‘‘queen,’’ as José calls her, is an aging prostitute who has killed one of her customers earlier in the evening. She now wants to leave town and put her old life behind her. None of these facts is ever told to the reader, but the details emerge with the description of the characters and as they talk. The woman comes to José’s restaurant as she does every evening at six, but today she is in need of an alibi. She does not tell José what has happened—at least not explicitly—instead she offers him a hypothetical situation of a fictitious woman who has killed a man she has slept with and asks him whether her action is defensible. She tries to suggest to him that she has been at his restaurant for longer than she actually has been: she has been there since a quarter to six, not six, she says. But although she repeatedly demands that she ‘‘wants another quarter of an hour,’’ José, it appears, never realizes that she is asking him to be her defense. Right up until the end, when she insists she has been at the restaurant since fivethirty, he declares that he does not understand what she means. She tries to tell him without actually spelling it out, that she needs him to lie to the authorities if they ask her where she has been since five-thirty, but he seems not to recognize what she is asking of him.

Or at least that is how it appears. But is José in fact ignorant of what the woman is asking him? As the story proceeds, the reader learns something about the relationship between the two characters, and it becomes a question as to what his responses to her entreaties exactly mean. José treats the woman with kindness, declaring that he loves her very much. He does not like the fact that she is a prostitute, and he says that he loves her to the extent that he would not go to bed with her, that he would kill the man who goes with her. The woman, on the other hand, mistreats José, mocking him because he is fat, talking to him harshly, and baiting him at every turn. But she also shows him some tenderness, calling him ‘‘Pepillo’’ and telling him she will bring him a ‘‘wind-up bear’’ if she returns after she goes away. She appears to trust him to some extent as well as to need him, and she tells him with some desperation about the supposedly fictitious woman who has killed the man she sleeps with. José seems to be willing to do almost anything for ‘‘queen’’; he is rather like the ‘‘wind-up bear’’ he asks for in that she seems to be able easily to manipulate him and get him to do her bidding. He seems to be very sensitive to her words (he is hurt when she calls him fat, blushes when she says he is jealous). But how is it then that, despite their familiarity with each other, their method of communicating through underhanded bantering, and their ability to understand each other’s signals, José does not understand when ‘‘queen’’ tries to tell him that she has murdered a man because of the disgust she felt at herself? And how can he not understand what she is telling him when it seems so obvious to the reader of the story?

Perhaps José simply is not the observant type; after all, ‘‘queen’’ chides him and says he ‘‘still hasn’t learned to notice anything’’ when he fails to see her unlighted cigarette at the beginning of the story. Perhaps he is simply slow. But perhaps it is that José does understand what the woman is saying to him and lets on that he doesn’t in order to protect her and to protect himself from the reality of the situation. His recognition of what has happened seems to come at the point in the story at which he has a ‘‘tremendous idea,’’ one that ‘‘had entered in through one ear, spun about for a moment, vague and confused, and gone out through the other, leaving behind only a warm vestige of terror.’’ José seems to understand then that the woman has done something awful. When she presses him about whether killing a man out of disgust would be selfdefense, he does not want to answer, but he finally does, wearing ‘‘an expression that was at the same time a cordial comprehension and a compromise of complicity.’’

These are both signs that José knows something that he is not letting on. When ‘‘queen’’ tells him that she will be leaving town, he tells her he is happy for her, even though earlier on he had told her she must be feverish for considering such a thing. He then agrees to tell anyone who asks that she got to his restaurant at a quarter to six. But, significantly, he agrees to this only after he sees the first customer coming in through the swinging door of the restaurant at ‘‘six-thirty on the dot’’; he agrees to give her a quarter of an hour after he knows it is safe to do so. So then, while it appears at first that José does not understand what ‘‘queen’’ is saying to him in the story, on closer consideration it seems that he might in fact know something about what she is asking him to do and why. Perhaps he knows what is going on but does not want it to be known that he does.

García Márquez never provides the reader with any definitive sense of how much José actually understands. It is never explicitly shown whether José correctly picks up on the many clues that ‘‘queen’’ offers him to explain her situation. The author never makes it clear what José thinks about what the woman is saying. All that is shown is his reaction to her, and his outward behavior. The reader is told what José says and how he reacts (he says he would kill for her, says that no decent woman would do what she says her fictitious woman has done, pretends to clean the restaurant counter, acts distracted) but it is not exactly clear how to interpret his behavior or what to make of it.

Indeed by the end of the story, the reader is in a similar situation as José. Many hints have been dropped and clues offered as to what has gone on, but it is not entirely clear what has taken place. What really has happened to queen? Has she in fact murdered her ‘‘john?’’ Is she asking José for an alibi? Does José know what she is trying to tell her? And what is the author trying to say by relating all of this? The reader is left feeling a similar sort of vague terror as José feels—that something awful has happened in the story, but it is difficult to know what to make of it. The story leaves the reader feeling as though she knows but does not know, that there is some mystery that is not solved, that there are questions that cannot definitively be answered.

With both the action of the story and the device of the story, García Márquez offers up a lesson about the nature of human communication. It is, significantly, not a didactic lesson that tells us exactly how things are, but a suggestion in the form of an intimate exchange about the complexity of relating to each other in words, gestures, and signals. Communication between human beings is a delicate matter; it is a difficult thing to say to each other the things that we want to. In life and in fiction people drop hints, say things sideways, and dance around the truth in order to communicate something deeper that they cannot seem to say in direct terms. And although in such exchanges, people can learn much about each other, in the end humans remain mysteries to one another.

José and queen talk in code by dropping clues and reading between the lines of their conversation, but in the end there is a gap in their understanding of each other; indeed at various points in the story the characters say that the other doesn’t understand or that they don’t know what the other is talking about. Similarly, the author of the short story offers clues to tell the reader about his ideas, about characters, about motivation. The reader can learn from this exchange, can gain insights about life that are not possible with more direct descriptions. But in the end, the clues that are dropped can only tell so much. A great deal about what we can know about other human beings, what they think and feel, what motivates them, what they are truly about, is left a mystery. Similarly, the short story can inform and teach us, but its ultimate ‘‘point’’ or ‘‘meaning’’ seems to be as elusive as the humans it seeks to understand.

Source: Uma Kukathas, Critical Essay on ‘‘The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock,’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.