THINK TWO

In the story “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the village people find a drowned man.  They saw how handsome and how tall he was. They noticed how they needed to change how they do things. The things they do daily got changed and it alternated how they viewed their lives. It made them notice that they need to accommodate situations and realize change is good.

“They could not find a bed in the village large enough to lay him on nor was there a table solid enough to use for his wake,” this shows that the village isn’t able to accommodate visitors. They stick to their same routine 24/7. This strange thing that happened changed their lives and how they live their lives. “They thought that if that magnificent man had lived in the village, his house would have had the widest doors, the highest ceiling, and the strongest floor, his bedstead would have been made from a midship frame held together by iron bolts, and his wife would have been the happiest woman,” they are fantasizing how life would be with him, how everything he has will be different because the villagers were used to the same old same old. They think that the way they live is the only way, because that is all they are used to.

I think that these villagers are not used to having change at all it’s changing their perspective on life. Everyday it’s the same thing over and over, so that’s all they ever expect to happen. “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,” the women are dismissing their husbands because they think they need to be just like Esteban, since he is different. All the women see are their husbands doing the same things over and over. So, if the husbands changed the way they did things, maybe their wives would have a different opinion about them. “They could see him in life, condemned…” They thought he would be condemned because nothing was his size, well maybe if they made things easier for all kinds of people to use instead of what they are accustomed to then they can accept anyone into their village instead of feeling sorry for them.

 The moral of the story is to expect changes even when you least expect it. Not everything will always stay the same. Just one day out of the blue, something will change your daily routine and you have to learn to adapt to it. Life is all about changes, we go through things that cause us to change the way we decide to do things. We just have to find a way to learn how to adapt to it.