THE HANDSOMEST DROWNED

MAN IN THE WORLD

By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
 About the Author

 Gabriel García Márquez, (born March 6, 1927, Aracataca, Colombia—died

April 17, 2014, Mexico City, Mexico), Colombian novelist and one of the
greatest writers of the 20th century, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1982, mostly for his masterpiece Cien años de
soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude). He was the fourth Latin
American to be so honoured, having been preceded by Chilean poets
Gabriela Mistral in 1945 and Pablo Neruda in 1971 and by Guatemalan
novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias in 1967. With Jorge Luis Borges, García Márquez
is the best-known Latin American writer in history. In addition to his masterly
approach to the novel, he was a superb crafter of short stories and an
accomplished journalist. In both his shorter and longer fictions, García
Márquez achieved the rare feat of being accessible to the common reader
while satisfying the most demanding of sophisticated critics.
 Summary

 The story begins with a group of children playing on the

beach. They spot a "dark and slinky bulge" in the ocean.
 At first they think it's a ship, then a whale, and finally,
when it washes up on shore, they realize it is a drowned
man.
 The children do what we might expect children to do with
a dead body: play with it.
 Finally, an adult spots the new toy and spreads word to
the rest of the village.
 The men of the town carry the body to the nearest house
and note how heavy it is. They suspect that maybe, since
it floated around for so long, water got into his bones.
 The village in question is a small fishing community,
twenty houses on a desert-like, flowerless cape bordered
with cliffs to the ocean below.
 There is such little space that dead bodies are thrown
over the cliffs and into the ocean, rather than buried.
 Because of the village's size, the men look around, see
that none of them is missing, and easily know that the
dead man is a stranger.
 That night, rather than going out to sea as usual, the men
head to the neighboring towns to see if anyone is missing
a large guy.
 The women stay behind to clean the body, which is
covered in seaweed, stones, crab, and other sea
paraphernalia.
 As they clean him off, the women notice that the junk he's
covered in is foreign to their part of the world – he comes
from somewhere far away.
 This drowned man seems proud, too, unlike other
drowned men they've seen in their time.
 When the drowned man is finally cleaned off, the women
are left breathless: "not only [is] he the tallest, strongest,
most virile, and best built man they [have] ever seen, but
even though they were looking at him there was no room
for him in their imagination".
 He's so big, in fact, that the women can't find a bed large
enough for him.
 None of their husband's clothes will fit him. So the
women, still fascinated by this amazing man, sew him
some clothes from a sail. As they work, they feel as
though their world has changed because of his arrival.
 If this man had lived here, they surmise, his house would
have been the biggest, his floor the strongest, his wife the
happiest. "They secretly compare him to their own men,
thinking that for all their lives theirs were incapable of
doing what he could do in one night, and they ended up
dismissing them deep in their hearts as the weakest,
meanest, and most useless creatures on earth".
 The oldest woman among them finally looks down at the
drowned man and says that he has the face of someone
called Esteban.
 All the women immediately agree.
 Though some of the younger women hope he is called
Lautaro, they realize that no, he is definitely Esteban.
 After midnight, "the sea [falls] into its Wednesday
drowsiness" .
 As the women watch the body being dragged along the
ground, they "shudder" with "pity."
 They realize that being so massive and manly must have
been a burden to the drowned man. "They could see him
in life, condemned to going through doors sideways,
cracking his head on crossbeams" , always a nuisance for
the hostesses of houses he visited, who couldn't find a
chair sturdy enough for him to sit on. He must have been
embarrassed all the time at being a "big boob," a
"handsome fool" .
 When the men return and announce that none of the
nearby villages can claim Esteban, the women rejoice that
he is now theirs.
 The men think their women are being foolish. They're
tired and want to get this burial done as quickly as
possible. They tie together a sort of stretcher to carry him
to the cliffs. They want to tie an anchor to his body so
that he will sink to the deepest part of the water.
 But while the men hurry, the women try to waste time,
adorning the body with more and more trinkets.
 The men grumble and complain until finally the women
remove the handkerchief from the drowned man's face.
 Then the men, too, are in awe with how handsome he is,
are left breathless, and see that he is "Esteban." They,
too, believe that he would be ashamed of his big,
burdensome body and the trouble he is causing the
villagers.
 So the villagers hold a splendid, elaborate funeral for the
drowned man.
 They go to neighboring villages to get flowers, and they
choose for him honorary family members from their
village, "so that through him all the inhabitants of the
village become kinsmen".
 The women weep so loudly that sailors going by hear them
and steer off course, and one man, thinking of the story of
Odysseus, ties himself to the main mast.
 As they carry his body to the cliff, the women are aware
for the first time of "the desolation of their streets, the
dryness of their courtyards, the narrowness of their
dreams as they face the splendor and beauty of their
drowned man" .
 When they finally let the body go off the cliff, they do not
anchor it, so that he can come back if he wishes.
 The villagers realize that from now on, everything will be
different.
 They will make their houses bigger and stronger and
better, and dig for springs in their courtyards, and paint
their houses bright colors "to make Esteban's memory
eternal", and plant flowers on their cliffs so that years
from now, sailors going by will see the colors and smell
the scents and know that there, on those cliffs, is
Esteban's village.
 Setting of the story

 The setting in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story is not definite, however,
speculations as to where the village is located may be made. Marquez bases
his novels and short stories on much of his nation’s history. His hometown,
Aracataca, Colombia, is the setting for many of Marquez’s works. In
Marquez’s most famous works, he introduces the village of Macondo, which
although quite larger than the village in “The Handsomest Drowned Man in
the World”, may very well be the developed version of Esteban’s village.
 Analysis
 Flowers
 The first thing we hear about the village is that it's made
up of "twenty-odd wooden houses that had stone
courtyards with no flowers […] on the end of a desertlike
cape" . Now jump to the women's speculations about the
drowned man's abilities: "He would have put so much work
into his land that springs would have burst forth from
among the rocks so that he would have been able to plant
flowers on the cliffs". Immediately we've got contrast
between the world of the villagers and that of the
drowned man. His arrival is like a splash of color against
their grey landscape. If the village is dry and colorless, the
drowned man brings with him the possibility of lively
springs and bright flowers.
Sea Imagery

"The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" is full of sea imagery, from the title on forward.
When the dead body first approaches the shore, the kids playing think he is a whale; then, a
ship. He even looks like some sort of funky sea monster: "when [his body] washed up on the
beach, they removed the clumps of seaweed, the jellyfish tentacles, and the remains of fish and
flotsam, and only then did they see that it was a drowned man". And shortly after, we're told
that "he had the smell of the sea about him and only his shape gave one to suppose that it was
the corpse of a human being, because the skin was covered with a crust of mud and scales". The
women use a sail to make him a shirt. They suppose that, if he were alive, "he would have had
so much authority that he could have drawn fish out of the sea simply by calling their names".
And later they imagine "his soft, pink, sea lion hands" as he's "stretched out like a sperm whale".

What we see is that the drowned man is an object of the sea. He comes from it at the start of
the story, and he is returned at the end to the sea, "where the fish are blind and the divers die of
nostalgia". The connection between the drowned man and the sea highlights his role as an
almost supernatural figure of mythology. He doesn't quite belong in this world, our world.
THE END!~