The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World Study Guide

Gabriel García Márquez spent the first eight years of his life in Aracataca, a city in a rural region of Colombia. Soon after he was born, his father became a pharmacist and moved with his wife to a nearby city, leaving the young Gabriel with his maternal grandparents. García Márquez’s early development was considerably influenced by his unique, rural upbringing and the personalities of his grandparents—his grandfather, who was known as “the Colonel,” was an excellent storyteller, and his grandmother, a superstitious woman, would often narrate events about the supernatural as though they were fully real. After moving to Bogotá, García Márquez began his studies in law, but he became increasingly interested in fiction and journalism. He started his career as a journalist while pursuing these studies, primarily covering domestic political events. The events he covered as a journalist, particularly La Violencia and the 1958 Venezuelan coup d’etat, strongly impacted his perspective. His commentary on these critical events appears in many of his writings. In 1967, García Márquez published his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which was widely read and received worldwide acclaim. In 1982, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, a recognition of his rich realization of the fantastical. He continued to write celebrated short stories, novels, and works of non-fiction until late in his life. After fighting with a misdiagnosed cancer for many years, he died of pneumonia in 2014.   

The historical setting of “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” is only vaguely defined. The central village of the story appears to exist in relative isolation, interacting only with neighboring villages. For this reason, it is difficult to place the setting of the story into an exact geographical and historical context. However, García Márquez’s perspective and writing were strongly inflected by his experience with La Violencia, a decade-long civil war in Colombia. The brutal rural fighting and censorship that occurred during this conflict impacted García Márquez’s understanding of the importance of community, as well as his view of the purpose of his work.   

“The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” is an example of magical realism, a genre in which fantastical events are mixed with the everyday. Magical realism is strongly connected with the Latin American Boom, a proliferation of acclaimed literature written by Latin writers in the 20th century. García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, Alejo Carpentier’s book The Kingdom of this World, and Jorge Luis Borges’s collection A Universal History of Infamy are some of the landmark examples of the genre and movement. García Márquez’s literary style was deeply influenced by several earlier works in the western literary tradition. In particular, García Márquez was formatively impacted by Kafka and his novel The Metamorphosis, which he read as a young writer. García Márquez has also acknowledged the influence of Faulkner and the mythohistoric qualities of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawtha county.