One Of These Days Essay

In Gabriel García Márquez’s short story “One of These Days,” an unlicensed dentist, Aurelio Escovar, uses his treatment of his town’s mayor to inflict pain on his patient, which he implies is retribution for an undetailed massacre or series of killings, and for the Mayor’s misrule of the town in a more general sense. Using the unassuming stage of a dentist’s office to convey a larger point about corruption, the relationship between rulers and those they rule, and societal roles, “One of These Days” subtly comments on the nature of power and its effect on society. In other words, “One of These Days” is fundamentally a political story. Specifically, Márquez uses Aurelio’s irreconcilable duties, as a dentist and as a citizen, to propel the story’s

The two characters, in different ways, betray the trust of others. The dentist betrays society by disobeying his role as a dentist to harm a patient, and betrays the mayor by putting him in pain through initially deciding not to treat him, and then by hurting him such that he “felt the crunch of bones in his jaw, and his eyes filled with tears” (though that specific part of the story, as discussed, is perhaps not a clear infliction of pain). The mayor’s betrayal is on a grander scale and more serious: he betrays the role of the mayor as an enforcer of laws by having an implied connection to the killing of the “twenty dead men,” and betrays his duty not to be corrupt by merging his personal finances with those of the town. These betrayals degrade the social atmosphere of the town, allowing for an infestation of malevolence and distrust. The town appears to have a casual relationship with bloodshed. The dentist’s son appears not to be panicking when he tells him that the mayor is threatening to shoot him, and the dentist barely bats an eye in response, and instead, “without hurrying, with an extremely tranquil movement, he stopped pedaling the drill, pushed it away from the chair, and pulled the lower drawer of the table all the way out. There was a revolver.” That the mayor threatening to murder a citizen does little to elicit shock shows that the town is used to violence, a violence perpetuated by the failure of people to fulfill their societal obligations, as represented by corruption, by inflicting pain, or by murder. Ultimately, it is the constant betrayal of societal duty, whether by the mayor, the dentist, or anyone else, that corrupts the town, that lays it low and allows it to