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The Masque Of A Death Foretold By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

466 Words2 Pages

The literary narrative of the story is reiterates the balance of the mundane and the supernatural that Gabriel Marquez has developed throughout. VAGUE Appearance everywhere at once in the mansion is one such uncertainty or perhaps this ubiquity represents the presence of divine forces, or Angels, everywhere in our lives; perhaps not. At any rate, Elisenda responds to the Angel's presence with typical shallowness, chasing him out of her life like a mere nuisance. His sickness and recovery are similarly ambiguous. The causality of his illness is unclear-could be the chickenpox (a joke, by the way, given that the Angel was caged with the chickens), could be something else. Causal relationships are ambiguous throughout the story. But his near-death and resurrection has a Messianic …show more content…

Perhaps rather than see the Angel as the artist, we are invited to see Elisenda as an artist of sorts. A work of the imagination, while it is being written, takes on an excitement quite unsuited to its ultimately ephemeral being. A writer has to worry about dull details-how does so-and-so enter the room? What is she wearing? What do they have for dinner?-before the work takes on a completeness, a poetics that identifies it as art. Just so, Elisenda has had to clean up after the Angel, chase him from room to room, until he finally takes off. Maybe the Angel is the art-arriving uninvited in the courtyard-and the husband and wife the artists. Perhaps the Angel never belonged among people-he was never an Angel at all as a real body, but becomes divine only as an idea. At any rate, the Angel flies off into the horizon, vanishing from reality, becoming purely imagined and remembered. Which, as a piece of the divine, and as a piece of writer's own imagination, is exactly where he

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