Death Constant Beyond Love Study Guide

Gabriel García Márquez was a Colombian writer, screenwriter, and journalist widely regarded as one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. He was born in 1927 in Aracataca, a small town near the northern, tropical coast of Colombia to a mother of indigenous Guajira Indian descent and a Bolivian father. García Márquez was raised by his maternal grandparents, who would prove huge influences on his writing; his grandfather had been a Liberal Colonel in the War of a Thousand Days, and his grandmother’s fondness for both Catholic folklore and indigenous Colombian mythology initiated his turn towards the magical. In 1947, Garcia Marquez studied law in Bogotá while writing short stories and poetry; he found some initial success, but his budding writing career was sidelined because of the Bogotá riots of 1948. Garcia Marquez then moved to Cartagena where he worked as a journalist, in Colombia and abroad, for the newspaper El Universal. In 1955 he moved to Geneva, then to Rome, then to Paris. Garcia Marquez traveled across Europe, studying cinema and continuing writing, but he found his greatest commercial success in 1967 when he published One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien anos de soledad) in Buenos Aires. Garcia Marquez married Mercedes Barcha and together they had two sons in 1958 and 1962. He was politically active throughout his career and was initially regarded by the US as a communist threat until the commercial success of his popular novels. In 1982, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature for works including One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. His health declined in the 2000’s after he was diagnosed with cancer, and he died in Mexico City in 2014.

García Márquez is often associated with a literary movement of the 1960’s and ‘70’s called the Latin American Boom (or El Boom) with young Latin American authors such as Julio Cortázar (from Argentina), Mario Vargas Llosa (from Peru), and Carlos Fuentes (from Mexico). This period saw authors from the global south gaining an international foothold. Their works are typically categorized by experimentation, non-linear narratives, and surreal or fantastic elements. Although “Death Constant Beyond Love” is a somewhat straightforward story for García Márquez, the indicators of the experimentation of this literary movement remain, with inanimate objects appearing lifelike and taking on a sentient quality. Additionally, García Márquez was heavily marked by the United Fruit Company workers strike and the massacre by the Colombian government in 1928 (and subsequent years of political turmoil in Colombia). In “Death Constant Beyond Love” there is the familiar undertone of distrust in politicians that García Márquez carried with him throughout his career.

Many of the themes found in “Death Constant Beyond Love” are also found in García Márquez’s most famous work, 100 Years of Solitude—a story set in Colombia and featuring seven generations of a single family. 100 Years of Solitude is known for its incorporation of magical realism, where events take place that couldn’t actually happen but in a setting that is recognizably real. There are light touches of this in “Death Constant Beyond Love,” like when bank notes floating through the air take on the appearance of butterflies. Also related to “Death Constant Beyond Love” is Julio Cortázar’s “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris,” an epistolary, surreal short story steeped in magical realism and grappling with the difficulties of existence and mortality. Additionally, though working primarily in a different era than García Márquez, Argentinian author Jorge Louis Borges’ short stories, such as his collection The Alph and Other Stories, evoke a surreal quality that handle themes such as life and death.