Summary
A group of children had spotted something floating in the sea water.
They originally thought it was a ship, but as it came closer it became clear the object was the body of a drowned man, covered in debris from the ocean. The children played with the corpse all day: they buried him in the sand and dug him up.
Soon, an adult from the village noticed what was going on and alerted the rest of the community.
The men from the village came to carry the drowned man to the nearest house. As they did so, they noted how heavy he was, heavier than a horse. They thought that perhaps the man continued to grow even after death. It was difficult to tell they were carrying the body of a man due to all the crust and sea residue that covered his body.
However, the villagers knew immediately that the man was not part of their community. It was a small village with only twenty houses, so small that the mothers worried the wind would carry their children away.
Anyone who died had to be tossed from the cliffs into the sea. But the ocean around them was serene and allowed them to continue to live.
All of the men in town could fit into a total of seven boats. Because the community was so small, all the villagers had to do to confirm the drowned man was a stranger was look around them and count the faces.
Analysis
The beginning of "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" helps establish the setting, style, and central conflict of the story. The story, like the title, is one rife with paradox: the morbid nature of death is lightened by the vitality of life through the figure of the beautiful drowned man.
As such, the story begins on the same notes, depicting what some would consider a disturbing scene: children playing on the beach with a corpse. However, the omniscient narrator does not portray this image as a discomfiting one. In fact, the narrator suggests that this scene is natural and unremarkable. The narrator notes that the children were fully aware the object was a drowned man (having first believed it to be a ship, and then a whale), and that they took turns burying the corpse and digging it up again.
The story thus treats the occurrence nonchalantly, focusing not on the grotesque nature of the man's water-logged corpse but instead on the innocence and energy of children at play. This opening image sets the scene for the rest of the story to unfold, when the villagers will come to see the drowned man not as a decaying corpse but as a beautiful symbol of hope and vitality.
The first few paragraphs of the story also display Marquez's signature style, now referred to as "magical realism." This device is one in which an author infuses a narrative with surreal, hyperbolic, or supernatural details that lend the story a mystical mood. However, these details are not strange enough to completely destabilize the realism of the story and turn it into fantasy or absurdism. Instead, magical realism serves to uncover the aesthetic value of everyday life.
In this particular story, elements of magical realism appear in the first description of the man, when the villagers remark that he is "taller than all other men because there was barely enough room for him in the house" (2). Another example of magical realism comes in the narrator's description of the small, tight-knit community: "There was so little land that mothers always went about with the fear that the wind would carry off their children and the few dead that the years had caused among them had to be thrown off the cliffs" (3). These two examples are hyperbolic descriptions that draw aesthetic attention to the object or place they describe without entirely transcending the realm of the real world. The story therefore begins on the same note as its title: strange and unexpected, but surprisingly wholesome in its subject matter.
