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Character Analysis: The Handsomest Drowned Man

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Jameel Pitts WRT 201 Professor Kelly 2/19/16 In “The Handsomest Drown Man Of The World”, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the village in ,which the drowned man is found is desperately seeking something, anything to believe in. The drowned man symbolizes all of the beauty of life they were previously blind towards. He is a mysterious traveler whom the villager give a story as well as the name “Esteban”. One morning, the village children find a seaweed covered body on the beach. They play with it until the adults discover the corpse and decide that it must be given a small funeral and thrown off the cliff which their village rests, into the sea as they do with all dead bodies. In order to do so, however, they must clean the corpse …show more content…

They knew nothing besides their own way of life and living. They have been confined. It is no wonder then that, "there was no room for him in their imagination."The drowned man could not fit into anything they owned, whether they were the beds, the houses, the doors, the clothes. True enough the drowned man did not fit in their world at all. He could be perceived as an alien of sorts, or an outsider. He became an object of mystery and curiosity, someone removed from reality. Hence he was attributed with very ideal and almost divine qualities. He is imagined as a man, quite literally, larger than life - their standard of living. "his house would have had the widest doors, the highest ceiling, and the strongest floor" They raised him above their own standards of how men should behave and act, "they secretly compared 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." And they attributed to him the character and demeanor of the humblest

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