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Gabriel García MárquezA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
From the first to the last sentences of García Márquez’s story, death is an underlying force shaping both consciousness and events. The reader recognizes that the news of impending death, delivered by a nonspecific “they” just months earlier, is a powerful force in Sanchez’s life (Paragraph 2). But it is also powerful for Nelson, who has administered death on his first wife, and for Laura, who marvels at it in looking at the always-present rose.
Death shapes Sanchez’s consciousness by disrupting the happy repetitions of his life. Before the news, he was “happy” with his wife and family (Paragraph 2). But now, on the campaign trail, the effort “not to think about death while he dozed” interrupts his sleep (Paragraph 3). He eats diet cereals and takes pills to preemptively strike against the pain of rich meals; “his soul sustained” by the pills, he can attempt to move on from the distraction that strains his routine (Paragraph 4). But death pulls him out of these cycles and repetitions in his life so that he can see the ways in which life traps him. This position makes him feel lonely.
By Gabriel García Márquez
A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings
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Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon
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Chronicle of a Death Foretold
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Eyes of a Blue Dog
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In Evil Hour
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Innocent Erendira
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Leaf Storm
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Love in the Time of Cholera
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Memories of My Melancholy Whores
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News of a Kidnapping
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No One Writes To The Colonel
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Of Love And Other Demons
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
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One Of These Days
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Strange Pilgrims
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The Autumn of the Patriarch
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The General in His Labyrinth
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The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World
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The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
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