Magical Realism: Garcia Marquez Explicatory Essay

Magical realism is explained as the desire of the author to show the ordinary life of people with the instances of unreal, fantastic events. In most cases the desire to present the magical realism in short stories is explained by the desire to create a fairy tale, however, the reasons are deeper.

Garcia Marquez used magical realism to write fascinating short stories such as “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” and “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” that captivated his readers and kept them interested up to the end of the stories showing human attitude to those who seem strange or not look like others.

The stories under consideration are absolutely different, however, they show human attitude to absolutely strange people. The “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” tries to show people how they usually consider others knowing about them nothing. A man is found dead and strange people express a desire to bury the body in accordance with the rules.

Reading the story it becomes obvious that strange people are ready for much when they do not know a person, but they like him/her. The main idea of the story is to show how people who absolutely do not know the body make everything for him just because they feel sympathy to him, just because they like the appearance of the man.

The villages know nothing about him, but his appearance helps them create the whole story of his life, they imagine that he had a wife and many other aspects which make sure that he was a good person. The imaginary realism plays the role of human consciousness and the desire to think about people only positive and good things.

The next story has almost the same meaning, but in this case the judgment of people is shown. In “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” Garcia Marquez discusses human opinion about a person they do not know. The magical realism is aimed at presenting more vivid picture, to express human thoughts more powerful and with specific images.

People always have personal opinion about others, and the author tries to make this opinion better. Reading the story, a strange man appears in different images. Some people believed that he was an angel as he had the wings. Others believed him to be a poor one as he was dirty, etc.

Therefore, it may be seen that different people created their opinion about this person on the basis of the particular images. The transformation of the hero depended on one particular thing either in the cloths or on the face expression of the man.

Therefore, it may be concluded that referring to the magical realism Garcia Marquez tried to show the inner world of human beings their relation to strange people and the aspects which create the opinion of different people. The social public opinion is created on the basis of the points of view people express.

The more similar ideas, like in “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” the more guarantee that the society will accept the person on the basis of this opinion. However, the general social opinion may be absent as there is no common opinion about a person, like in the short story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” Garcia Marquez by.