There a couple of key aspects you should keep in mind when reading fiction to interpret the full meaning of the work. One of these elements is the internal and external journeys that are present in most stories. An external journey is something a character does that can be observed, such as a boy throws a tantrum when he gets mad, and an internal journey is what a person thinks and feels inside that is difficult to notice just by looking at the person, such as a teenager who is bitter over the socks he got for Christmas. Both of these elements occur in “The Most Handsome Drowned Man in the World” by Gabriel García Marquez. The story is about a village that finds an unknown dead man on their shore. The men of the village go to other villages to check if he is from anywhere nearby, while the women care for him.
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The internal journey would be how the women get curious about the complete stranger and how badly they wish that the large man would come back from the dead. As they were cleaning him up, “they went on distracted by these labyrinths of fantasy” (Marquez 2) that he would come back to them. Usually, the external journey represents the internal journey, which directly influences the conclusion of the story. In this story, the women in the village grew so attached that others started going along with them. They covered him in flowers and renamed their town to his name. What was supposed to be a simple funeral for a stranger turned into a grandiose ceremony. He opened their eyes that there are people larger than them far away from the village, so they built bigger houses with larger doors. Although the man never said a word or did anything, he turned into a man that they all honored because they never seen someone so large and handsome. They realized that there were people very different than them far away that they never
The internal journey would be how the women get curious about the complete stranger and how badly they wish that the large man would come back from the dead. As they were cleaning him up, “they went on distracted by these labyrinths of fantasy” (Marquez 2) that he would come back to them. Usually, the external journey represents the internal journey, which directly influences the conclusion of the story. In this story, the women in the village grew so attached that others started going along with them. They covered him in flowers and renamed their town to his name. What was supposed to be a simple funeral for a stranger turned into a grandiose ceremony. He opened their eyes that there are people larger than them far away from the village, so they built bigger houses with larger doors. Although the man never said a word or did anything, he turned into a man that they all honored because they never seen someone so large and handsome. They realized that there were people very different than them far away that they never