THE HANDSOMEST DROWNED MAN

‘The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World’ is a short story by the Colombian writer Gabriel
García Márquez, published in his 1972 collection Leaf Storm and Other Stories. A story about
acceptance, community, and honouring the dead, ‘The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World’
is one of Márquez’ most powerful stories.

Before we offer an analysis of the story’s meaning, here’s a brief recap of the plot.

‘The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World’: plot summary

Some children playing on a beach see a strange bulge in the sea, and think it is an enemy ship
or a whale. But when the mysterious object is washed up on the shore, they realise it is the
body of a man. They play with it, burying it in the sand and digging it up again, when someone
notices the body and alerts the attention of the village.

The dead man is then carried into the nearest house. He is a large man, and nobody in the
village recognises him. So the men of the village head off to the neighbouring villages to find out
if they’re missing a large man from their village, while the women remain behind with the
drowned man, cleaning the mud from his body. They observe the strange vegetation, including
coral, on his body and realise he must have travelled from some distant land.

When they have cleaned his body, the women observe that he is tallest, strongest, and most
manly man they have seen. No bed or table in the village appears to be big enough for him.
They set about making a pair of pants for the drowned man so he can be buried with dignity.

They begin to fantasise about all the marvellous things the drowned man would be able to do if
he lived in their village, and they compare their own men unfavourably with him, considering
their men to be the weakest, meanest, and most useless men by comparison.

The oldest woman pronounces that the drowned man has the look of someone who would be
called Esteban. They start to feel pity for him, realising how difficult a life he must have led,
being so tall and big, always ducking under doorways and embarrassing people. They cover his
face with a handkerchief so, even in death, he isn’t bothered by the light.

They begin to weep from him, when the men return and announce that the drowned man did not
belong to any of the neighbouring villages. The women are overjoyed, declaring that he belongs
to them, and the men are taken aback by their attitude. They want to bury the man at sea as
soon as possible, but the women look for reasons to delay them.

The men grow annoyed with the women for being so emotionally invested in the dead body of a
stranger, but when the handkerchief is removed from the drowned man’s face, the men are
struck by how ashamed the dead man looks, and realise that he didn’t ask to be so big and tall,
and so the men of the village come to share the women’s sympathy towards Esteban.
Together, they hold a big funeral for Esteban, and decide to rebuild their houses with wider
doors and higher ceilings, so the memory of Esteban could do anywhere without having to duck.
They also decide to plant lots of flowers along the cliffs, so that passing ships will smell their
sweet scent and know that this village is Esteban’s village.

BIRTHDAY GIRL

In a review of Haruki Murakami's third short story collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman,
published in 2006 in London's Guardian, Tobias Hill wrote: "In many of these stories, narrative
tension is prolonged by a refusal to explain." This description aptly fits Murakami's short story,
"Birthday Girl," which is contained in this collection. The story easily carries the reader's interest
as the tension builds up, but at the end of the story it is difficult to say exactly what the story is
about.

Murakami is one of Japan's most popular authors. His stories easily fascinate his readers as his
plots takes them places they may never have been before. Readers continue to turn the pages
of his stories, hoping they will finally solve the puzzles that Murakami's stories pose. It is not
until the final page that readers often realize Murakami does not always solve the mysteries he
has created. This is true in this short story about two unnamed people who are discussing the
events of their twentieth birthdays. Readers are privy only to what happened to one of them.

This woman, who is now married and a mother, reflects on the day she turned twenty. She was
working as a waitress in an Italian restaurant in Tokyo, when the manager of the restaurant falls
sick and has to leave. One of the manager's everyday tasks was to deliver a chicken dinner to
the owner of the restaurant who lived on the sixth floor. As the manager leaves for the hospital,
he asks this twenty-year-old to perform the task for him that night, which she does.

After she knocks on the restaurant owner's door, a short, well dressed, elderly man appears.
She had never seen the owner before, as he never stepped foot into his own restaurant. The
owner asks her to come in. After the girl sets out the plates, the elderly man asks her questions
and discovers this is the girl's birthday. As a present, he offers her a wish. The girl carefully
considers his suggestion and makes a wish before she leaves.

In a conversation with a friend several years later, she refuses to reveal what her wish entailed.
She is also vague as to whether the wish came true. She merely makes a statement that no
matter what happens to a person, he or she will always be who they were meant to be. And that
is how the story ends.

FREEDOM FROM THE KNOWN

FEAR, PLEASURE, SORROW, thought and violence are all interrelated. Most of us take
pleasure in violence, in disliking somebody, hating a particular race or group of people, having
antagonistic feelings towards others. But in a state of others. But in a state of mind in which all
violence has come to an end there is a joy which is very different from the pleasure of violence
with its conflicts, hatreds and fears.

Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a
gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear. So violence isn’t merely
organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much
more subtle, much deeper, and we are inquiring into the very depths of violence.

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you
are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the
rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds
violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to
any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding
of mankind.

The moment you protect your family, your country, a bit of coloured rag called a flag, a belief, an
idea, a dogma, the thing that you demand or that you hold, that very protection indicates anger.
So can you look at anger without any explanation or justification, without saying, I must protect
my goods, or I was right to be angry, or How stupid of me to be angry? Can you look at anger as
if it were something by itself? Can you look at it completely objectively, which means neither
defending it nor condemning it? Can you?

Most of us have accepted violence as a way of life.

To live completely, fully, in the moment is to live with what is, the actual, without any sense of
condemnation or justification - then you understand it so totally that you are finished with it.
When you see clearly the problem is solved.

MOTHER TONGUE

“Mother Tongue” explores Amy Tan’s relationship with the English language, her mother, and
writing. This nonfiction narrative essay was originally given as a talk during the 1989 State of the
Language Symposium; it was later published by The Threepenny Review in 1990. Since then,
“Mother Tongue” has been anthologized countless times and won notable awards and honors,
including being selected for the 1991 edition of Best American Essays.

The original publication of “Mother Tongue,” which this study guide refers to, breaks the essay
into three sections. In the first Tan briefly primes the reader on her relationship with “different
Englishes”. Tan bridges the first and second parts of the essay with descriptions of her “mother’s
English,” or her “mother tongue”. In the second section Tan describes the impact her mother’s
language had on her; Tan’s mother is a Chinese immigrant who often relied on her daughter to
produce “perfect English”. In the concluding section Tan then connects her mother’s English to
Tan’s own choices regarding writing style and career.

In the initial section of “Mother Tongue,” Amy Tan locates her position as “a writer… someone
who has always loved language” . She describes the multiple Englishes that she uses, from
formal academic language to the English she uses with her mother to the English she uses at
home with her husband. The section concludes with Tan’s description of her mother’s
“expressive command of English"., which is in conflict with her mother’s fluency in the language.
Although her mother might speak English that is difficult for native speakers to understand, to
Tan, her mother’s language is “vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery”.

As Tan moves through the second section of “Mother Tongue,” she describes some of the more
difficult aspects of being raised by a parent who spoke English that others struggled to
understand. Tan references the oft-used language of “broken” English and suggests that her
mother’s English and way of speaking, despite its obvious interpersonal and social limitations
(including harming Tan’s performance on such metrics as standardized tests), provided Tan a
different semantic way of understanding the world.

The final section of “Mother Tongue” transitions into personal reflection as Tan describes how
she has reckoned with being raised by her mother in a xenophobic society. As a writer, Tan only
found success when she moved away from more proper, academic register and instead wrote
“in the Englishes [she] grew up with”. The essay concludes with Tan’s mother’s opinion about
Tan’s most famous novel, The Joy Luck Club, in which Tan attempted to write in this fashion.
Her mother’s “verdict: ‘So easy to read’” .

THAT CRAFTY FEELING

Smith opens the essay and the lecture by admitting that she was indecisive about the prospect
of presenting a paper and telling people about “craft”. The author finds writing fiction
comparatively easy than presenting a paper; she finds writing fiction something she is able to
do. Fiction doesn’t necessarily have to change someone’s mind or influence them whereas a
paper or lecture is presented to make people understand things better so; it is understandable
to the reader or the listener why the author was rather anxious. The author advices the reader to
never read something called “The Art of Fiction,” unless it is about some specific books and not
generalized because she believes that each piece of fiction is unique and different. The author
feels honest about writing about craft only when she is writing about her own creations or when
she has a specific piece of fiction as a reference.
The author further classifies the lectures on craft in two categories where the first is more useful
and practical than the second one. The first kind of lecture is best given by critics and
academics whereas the second one is given by authors who want to say something profound
about their novel. The second one causes a disconnection because every writer has a different
writing style which the others may or may not understand. The writers feel rather uncomfortable
sharing their innermost thoughts and their writing process with the world. Smith tells the
audience that even if she was writing a novel for ten years and was asked to give “some aspect
of the craft”, she would be unable to do so. The reader understands this dilemma because
writers often don’t like to share their innermost thoughts and feelings with others unless it’s in
the form of a story. The fact makes sense as to why Zadie Smith does not want to lay her writing
process and insights out in the open.

Zadie says that the fact that the word ‘craft’ is used here to describe the way she writes most of
her story in her pyjamas seems bizarre to her. This provides an insight about the process of
writing a book that though sometimes, authors use eloquent words and various different
metaphors to describe a single thing, in the end; they are also human beings like everyone who
is going to read their books. A writer pours their heart and soul out in a story while writing and
manages to complete several drafts, cross out and add on so many paragraphs, before the
finished product makes its way to be publishes, whereas the critics only see the finished work
and not the process it took to finish it. Thus, their analysis is done after the completion. They are
not concerned with the inner workings of the writer. Therefore, the author believes that they are
less likely to help writers on their pieces.

James Wood’s book How Fiction Works describes the “intimate third person”. Zadie Smith, while
reading the book, felt as if the reader part of her brain was stunned about how much happens in
the making of a single piece of fiction while the writer in her who has actually written in the same
writing style was stunned because of how accurate the description was. She believes that any
critic would be able to tell the readers about craft more than she ever could. She admits that she
has been fraudulent before while sharing about her writing process and finally she wanted to try
an honest approach instead. The lecture thereafter is divided into ten different sectio0ns which
talk about the different phases a writer, namely the author here, goes through while writing
fiction.

Part one
Writing a novel requires confidence, or at the least, tricking yourself into thinking that you are
confident. Smith says that she does not need cheerleaders; instead she needs people who will
make her feel bad. For some time, she had a quote on her wall that made her feel bad. She
used to think that her novel needs to have hidden agendas and clues otherwise it would not be
worth. Like many writers, she is also ashamed of some of her past work and feels as if that was
written by a different person; same as a Portuguese novelist she once met who told her to not
read his first novel. This is what happens with other people’s words, they are important until they
are not. All writers feel as if they were a different person two novels ago. People change and
grow just as writers do; after all, writers are people too. Smith says that whenever she writes her
novel, she looks forward to the time when she would start hating the piece.
 Part Two
Some writers, while writing their own novel, would never read a single sentence that is not their
own because they think that it would cause them to be influenced by the writing and their words
would not be completely their original thoughts. Smith says that she does not do that, she wants
to read other people stories and be influenced. Though she admits that she does not want to
read any story that is been handed to her; while writing, she only wants to read the best
literature she can find because she feels that then only, she would be able to write her best
work. She says that she has a formed a bond with Keats and holds him in high regard. She
feels that she connects to him and his way of writing more than that of any other author.

That Crafty Feeling | Analysis – Middle-of-the-Novel Magical Thinking

The middle of the novel is not a physical place but a mental place where the author forgets
everything and just immerses them into the art of writing. It is the state of mind where the author
starts living the story instead of just writing it and they also forget that they are not in the story
world. Words flow freely and the author loses sense of everything while remaining blissfully
unaware of them. The only thing that exists is their story. It is a state of mind where the story
starts unravelling and everything starts making sense to the author. Everything starts correlating
to the book the author is writing, even a random poetry book off the shelf seems to find the
perfect place in the narrative.

Dismantling the Scaffolding

The author says that while writing a novel, one uses a lot of scaffolding, some of which is
necessary and some unnecessary. Smith says that she divides the whole novel into sections of
chapters. She uses it to divide the novel into parts so it does not seem like an endless manual
and still makes sense to the reader. Later, she realizes that a lot of the scaffolding was
unnecessary so she advices her audience, if they use scaffolding, to remove it later.

First Twenty Pages

During the end chapters of the novel, Smith reads the first twenty pages one more time and
realizes that a lot of the material on the paper does not make sense, even to her own eyes. So,
she tries to fix and edit those pages. Instead of trying too hard on making the reader understand
the plot, she tries to keep her focus on the story and the character and improve them. Though
she thinks that her characters don’t make much sense and are not interesting enough.

The Last Day

Being a Micro Manager has this advantage because, when Smith writes the last sentence, it is
really the last sentence and she has no more things to say. She also has a habit of editing as
she goes along. In this part, she describes the happiness she feels after her novel is complete
and she seems to enjoy other little things in life.

Step Away from the Vehicle

Smith says that even if she does not follow this advice, she is telling this to others so that they
can. She says that after finishing a novel, the author should let the novel rest for as much time
as they can. Because as mentioned earlier, writers grow in time and become better, so if they
are editing their novel after some time it’s been written then they would be able to edit it in a
much better way and they would produce a work like never before.

The Unbearable Cruelty of Proofs

Smith says that she does not like her books being proofed because they lose so much essence.
She feels like all the hard work she has done in a page is just crossed out by a single line. Every
time someone finds faults in her writings, she just wants to take it back and start all over again
but she can’t because at that time, she would be exhausted.

Years Later: Nausea, Surprise and Feeling OK

Like most writers, Smith also finds it difficult to read her own writing after it has been published.
She says that she never reads the whole book because she gets nausea. One time, she did
read some parts of her book and she says that she was genuinely surprised because there
were things that she didn’t remember writing. She felt a strange feeling neither pleasant nor
unpleasant. There were some moments, while reading her own book, which she felt that she
had captured the essence of what she wanted to say perfectly. She felt OK, maybe good even.

DISTANT RELATIONS:

“Distant Relations” is a chapter from Pamuk’s book The Museum of Innocence.

The story begins with the narrator talking about his fiancée Sibel. It was 1975 and she had just
noticed a purse in a shop window (by Jenny Colon). He made a note to go back and get the
purse. Although they are in Turkey, both protagonists have been abroad, He studied in
America, while Sibel studied in Paris.

The next day he decided to go to the shop and buy the purse. It was owned by a distant
relative. She wasn’t there when he went in, but instead there was a beautiful young woman
there. Before the transaction was finished, he recognized who it was. It was his “cousin”
Füsun. I put cousin in quotes because it turns out that she is very very distantly related.

They catch up a bit–she explains that she is studying for university entrance exams. She
comes to the shop to meet new people and to help out. He buys the purse and that’s that.

Until that night when he tells his mother about seeing her. She explains that Füsun’s family are
more like in-laws, but that they have always been very poor. “Aunt Nesibe” Füsun’s mother, had
always liked the narrator’s mother , and so his mother tried to help out as often as
possible–giving her sewing work and the like.

But that all ended when the narrator’s mother learned that Nesibe had encouraged her daughter
to enter a beauty pageant. Thereby branding Füsun with the label of whore and making Nesibe
look disgraceful in the eyes of her family.

The narrator returns to Sibel. He explains that they are indeed engaged. They are so engaged,
that Sibel has agreed to sleep with him–making her somewhat daring but also showing that she
really trusts him. When they meet for dinner that night he gives her the Jenny Colon bag, very
proud of himself. And that’s when she reveals that the bag is a fake. And she hopes he didn’t
pay a lot for it..

The next day he returned the bag. Füsun was there again. She is dismayed by the fraud, but
agrees to refund his money. Until she begins crying, explaining how she really isn’t an
employee there. She says that he can’t talk to his relative about what happened, or she’ll just
get mad at him. So Füsun agrees to get him the money. And she asks where she should
deliver it. And that’s when he gives an answer that could cause everything to come tumbling
down.

BLACKBERRY PICKING

In this poem, the speaker recalls a recurring scene from his youth: each August, he
would pick blackberries and relish in their sweet taste. The week would start with just one ripe
blackberry, but soon, all of the other berries would be ripe for the picking. Blackberry picking
was a fleeting activity, however; the fruits would only last about a week before they turned sour
and died. Every year, the speaker confesses, he would hope that they would stay longer, even
though he always knew that they would not.The speaker of the poem is taking a nostalgic look
back at the summers of his childhood, when each August, depending on the weather, he and his
friends or family members would spend one week picking blackberries and delighting in their
beautiful colors and delicious taste.
From these first two lines, the reader can glean that ‘Blackberry-Picking’ takes place in
late summer, probably in the countryside, since blackberries do not normally grow in a city
setting. The speaker also informs the reader that conditions had to be just so in order for this to
happen. If the summer brought heavy rain and sun, the blackberries would ripen. The
experience would not happen if the conditions were not just so.
Additionally, the reader can also assume this event takes place in the past with the verb phrase
“would ripen.” The passage of time has not tempered the images the speaker remembers, and
the rest of the poem is full of beautiful pictures of the natural world. The speaker then informs
the reader that the process started out slowly each year.
Heaney’s diction is also important to note. Instead of calling the blackberry fruit or berry, he uses
the metaphor of a clot, which not only discloses the color of the berry but also the texture and
feel of it. What does a clot do when pressure is applied? It bursts, much like the first blackberry
of the season would.
The speaker draws the reader into the memory. Heaney uses personification here. While
summer does not actually have blood, the blackberry juice represents the vitality of the season.
The speaker’s experience with eating the first blackberry of the season is almost sexual: it
leaves him lusting for more.

Not long after the first ripened blackberry, the others would need picking, and it would send the
speaker and his friends to pick as many as possible.
The speaker and his friends would endure the scratches of briars and the discomfort of wet
boots in order to make their way to the blackberry patches, but it did not bother them. They were
not discerning when it came to the type of container they would take with them; so long as the
containers could fit a fair share of blackberries, they would carry it with them.
The speaker discloses that the blackberry patches are out of the way, and the task of picking
could be laborious. Heaney uses a simile to describe how the blackberries looked in the
speaker’s pails.
Line fourteen also contains alliteration; Heaney repeats the letter b in neighboring words,
emphasizing the image of the blackberries that looked like eyes in a bucket. Heaney was known
for his use of literary devices, and this poem is no exception. The next line of
‘Blackberry-Picking’ contains an allusion to one of the most famous and deadliest pirates in
history: Bluebeard. Heaney extends the metaphor of summer’s blood into this line. After the
speaker and his friends have picked the blackberries in the patch, they have the blood of the
fruit on their hands, much like Bluebeard after one of his famous battles.
Lines eighteen through twenty-four juxtapose the first seventeen lines of the poem. The first half
of the work is filled with life; however, the last section details the inevitable: the fruits cannot stay
ripe forever. This change in tone is interpreted in one single word: but. After picking as many
berries as possible, the berries would begin to rot and ferment.
The speaker and his friends could not only see the fruit turn bad, but they could also smell it:
“The juice was stinking too.” Heaney ends the poem on a particular melancholy note. Nature is
cyclical, as these final lines show. While the speaker always had hope that the berries would not
go so quickly, he knew that every year would be the same as the previous.

TALKING TO MYSELF

Kishwar Naheed is one of the best known Urdu feminist poets of Pakistan. She was born in
Bulandshahr, Uttar Pradesh, India in 1940. Her family moved to Lahore in Pakistan during the
the sub-continent of 1947. Kishwar had witnessed violence (including rape and abduction of
women) associated with partition. She has published six collections of poems between 1969
and 1990. All her texts are about to redefine the man and woman relationship in the context of
female sexuality, politics and social issues.

The poem ‘Talking to Myself’ is about a feeling and dream of a woman who wants to be free.
She has a desire to go beyond what the man and this world expected from a woman. In the
poem, the persona gives pictures to the readers about pain, misery and oppression that she
faced from a person called man. But the most important, this poem purposely gives a sarcastic
expression of what tortured and oppressed woman’s feel towards a man. It is based on what the
man have done to her. It also tells that the persona can do more than the man expects because
she can fight against all bad things that happen to her before and this will give bad effect to the
man’s pride.

Since we focus on the usage of symbolism in this anthology, we discover this element in the
poem through the word ‘Punish’. From our point of view, the word ‘punish’ symbolizes the whole
feeling of the persona. It indicates the oppression and misery experienced by the persona.
Besides, the word ‘punish’ has been repeated 10 times and for us, this shows that the word is
very important to convey her dream and desire within her inner feeling. So each time the word
‘punish’ appear in this poem, it will be followed by the expression of the persona’s feeling, which
can be good evidence as the word symbolizes oppression and misery.

After several times analyzing this poem, we have found out that the element of symbolism is
useful in creating the theme. From our point of view, this poem’s theme is the expression, hope
and dream of a depressed woman to seek for freedom in the patriarchal society. When we relate
the symbolism element to this theme, it really does make sense. The word ‘Punish’ symbolizes
oppression and misery that definitely related to the theme. This patriarchal culture context
clearly explains that the symbolism and the theme is getting along together in order to convey
the internal messages. The poet, Kishwar uses the symbolism element to strengthen the theme.
From our opinion, the sarcastic style in this poem by using symbolization ‘Punish’ has succeed
to show the theme of internal painful feeling of a woman.