In the short story, “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez the villagers are changed by their experiences with the drowned man, and they begin to question the quality of their own lives and their village. Beginning with the children, Marquez hints that there is something different about this drowned man. When the drowned man first washes up on the beach the children were the first to see the corpse, but they are not frightened by the dead man. In fact, “they had been playing with him all afternoon,” (1). When the men carry him to be scraped clean by the women they notice “that he weighed more than any dead man they had ever known,” (1). After the women finish cleaning him off, they realized “what kind of man he was and it left them …show more content…
They think “he would have so much authority that he could have drawn fish out of the sea simply by calling their names,” (1). The women believe the drowned man is so incredible that “they secretly compared him to their own men,” (1). The women start to doubt their own men. The drowned man makes the women think “that for all their lives theirs [men] were incapable of doing what he [drowned man] could do in one night,” (2) and they end up “dismissing them deep in their hearts as the weakest, meanest, and most useless creators on earth,” (2). While the women were “wandering through that maze of fantasy,” (2) the oldest woman looked at the drown man “with more compassion than passion” deciding that the magnificent drowned man “‘has the face of someone called Esteban,’” (2). Shortly after, the women understood “how unhappy he must have been with his huge body since it bothered him after death,” (2). Later the women covered his face with a handkerchief and Esteban “looked so forever dead, so defenseless,” (2) that the women went form from sighs, to wails, and the more they sobbed the more they felt like weeping,” (2). The women’s emotions toward the drowned man kept