“The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World”

In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,” we bear witness to the power of mythos in the creation of cultural identity. As the story’s villagers begin to embrace “Esteban” as one of their own, including all the characteristics and traits they imagine him to once have had, they begin to construct for themselves a kind of socio-cultural identity without which their relatively unimportant existence would be difficult to bear. As such, Marquez makes clear that in the fight to distinguish ourselves from each other, we risk alienating our genuine identities in the sources via which we would derive them.

As we make our way through the story, the villagers charged with Esteban’s care attach increasing levels of importance to the manner in which this care is administered. Indeed, the village’s women in particular become truly fascinated by Esteban’s physical qualities, as though they are engaged in a creative exercise with foundations rooted in Esteban: “As they sewed, sitting in a circle and gazing at the corpse between stitches, it seemed to them that the wind had never been so steady nor the sea so restless as on that night and they supposed that the change had something to do with the dead man” (Marquez 1). As such, a commonplace activity such as sewing is suddenly imbued with supplemental meaning for the women of the village, who begin to imbue all the commonplace activities with which they are familiar with a vitality that is somehow absent without Esteban’s influence.

The village’s women perpetuate this dangerously perverse form of thinking, as they begin to consider Esteban as somehow superior in nature to their own men. “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” (Marquez 1). In this sense, the creation of a cultural identity through the cultivation of Esteban’s mythos threatens to cause something of an upheaval in the daily life of the villagers, with women dismissing their husbands as weak and unproductive solely by virtue of how they imagine these men might have compared to their idealized assessment of Esteban.

Given this, Marquez exposes the reader to the manner in which mythos can threaten to erode the very foundations of the lives and existences that they are intended to imbue with meaning. After all, a socio-cultural identity is entirely meaningless without a corporeal and authentic existence in which to establish this identity. However, in the process of endeavoring to create this identity, the women of the village undermine the causes that such an identity would be designed to further; namely, the cultivation of a cooperative and institutionally sound society. Eventually, the void that might be filled by a genuine form of mythos in the furtherance of authentic cultural identity cedes to nothing at all: “the silence put an end to any last doubts: he was Esteban” (Marquez 1). In this sense, the villagers cede their rightful authority to cultivate their own identities by giving life to the very void that they intend to fill. Suddenly, even silence comes to define the village through a process that should be constituted by more authentic sound.

This unproductive expending of energy on the part of the village women takes its toll on their male counterparts. The men become “Fatigued because of the difficult nighttime inquiries, all they wanted was to get rid of the bother of the newcomer once and for all before the sun grew strong on that arid, windless day” (Marquez 1). In this sense, the engagement of their women in so frivolous an attempt at forming domestic identity saps their men of the energy to meaningfully engage in the same process. Indeed, “the men began to feel mistrust in their livers and started grumbling about why so many main-altar decorations for a stranger.” In other words, the men who would otherwise be engaged in perhaps an exercise in cultural identity construction that would incorporate traditional values indicative of the welcoming of strangers—kindness or generosity, for example—instead become disgusted with the notion, as perceived through the treatment of Esteban. In this regard, one begins to perceive that the village has created its own monster in allowing Esteban, a corpse, to serve as the defining character by which their relative importance will be formed for all the world.

In the end, Marquez laments the fate of the villagers with regard to their failures in effectively forging meaningful identity. As Marquez writes, “they also knew that everything would be different from then on, that their houses would have wider doors, higher ceilings, and stronger floors so that Esteban's memory could go everywhere without bumping into beams (1). As such, the identity that might otherwise have been authentically formed by and for the villagers becomes ensconced in a fleeting memory that is really no memory at all, but actually a fiction of the village collective’s imagination. The identity forged for the village is predicated upon Esteban, whose nature of identity is unknown and, to the extent that it has been fictionalized, can only operate according to its limited parameters, seemingly afloat in the air, en route to no place in particular. In the end, the townspeople find themselves living in “Esteban’s Village,” though none of them know why they do so or how to do so. In such a way does Marquez elucidate the dangers of failing to root one’s cultural identity in the real by exercising insufficient control over the process by which it is created.

Work Cited

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,” North Dakota State University, n.d., https://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/CreativeWriting/423/MarquezHandsomestDrownedMan.htm