Reform and Transform: Literary Analysis on “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World”

Catalysts of change come in many forms—a manifesto, a song, a vote, among others.
Sometimes, it is washed ashore as a larger-than-life drowned man. Gabriel García Márquez’s
1968 short “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” illustrated the arrival of the titular
being as a breakthrough for the villagers to expand their meaning of reality by identity
reformation and collective transformation.

Throughout the story, we see the drowned man under different lenses of the villagers. To the
children, he first was a bulge, then an enemy ship, then a whale before ultimately becoming their
playmate in the sand. The women saw him with emblazoned eyes of passion and fascination as
humungous as his physical difference with their men, whom initially saw him as a cold piece of
meat: a Wednesday dead body.  However, they filled his lifelessness with life. Soon, they were
all engulfed in his beauty. Finally, he was Esteban.

Further, these identities are reconstructions of the villagers’ lenses. They must see him in terms
of their discourse, making Esteban “a champion of their own standards” (Hendrickson, 1995).
Márquez’s use of magical realism and hyperbole strengthens this narrative of reformation. The
drowned man becomes the satisfaction of the women’s projections of desire, for he was the
“tallest, strongest, most virile, and best built man they had ever seen…there was no room for him
in their imagination”. Likewise, Kohlbeck (2018) states that Esteban is the validation of the
men’s innate need for expression and vulnerability, especially when even a corpse like him
seemed to be ashamed: “he was the most destitute, most peaceful, and most obliging man on
earth, poor Esteban”.

The drowned man is now an image of an ideal archetype, at least for the villagers; there is a
newfound sincerity in all of them. He is Esteban. He is their Esteban. 

Thus, a spark of motivation pushes the villagers to give their beloved drowned man the best
funeral they can give. In this part of the story, Márquez’s tone seems to ripen. His words flow in
fruition, mainly because of the release from the previous mundanity of the otherwise
extraordinary event in the village of twenty-odd wooden houses. The shift of tone fits the
narrative’s shift; the preparation for his burial marked his social essence for the villagers. They
filled the stone courtyards with flowers—a rarity in the village. The earlier nuances of
disintegration, of mystery, to the villagers, seem to be long gone. Esteban is closer to being a
past, a memory for the islanders of the change they are yet to bring upon themselves (Nahar &
Sarker, 2018).

Esteban renders a transformative force upon these people. They started to notice the bleakness in
their lives, how it pales in comparison to what they think the drowned man’s reality is. They
wanted to act upon it, rebuilding their desolate village to honor Esteban. Now, even the villagers
are recreating their identity: “they chose a father and mother from among the best people, and
aunts and uncles and cousins so that through him all the inhabitants of the village became
kinsmen”.  

Finally, being Esteban’s village is now the villagers’ broader worldview, built upon the
reformation of the drowned man’s identity and the collective transformation it inspired. They
will never be the same.
 REFERENCES

García Márquez, G. (1954). The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World. 

Collected Stories, 247-54.

Hendrickson, J. (1995). The Strategies of Revealing How Identities Have Become Problematized
in Latin America, Using the Selected Works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Kohlbeck, M. (2018). Dr. Pennington English 305, Version 1 2 November 2018 García
Márquez’s “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World”: A Representation of Jung’s.

Nahar, Md. Abdul Momen Sarker, N. (2018). Marquezs The Handsomest Drowned Man in the
World A Man of Multifaceted Significance. 
Global Journal Of Human-Social Science Research, .
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