23 pages • 46 minutes read
Gabriel García MárquezBalthazar's Marvelous Afternoon
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1983A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Ekphrasis
Early in the story, the narrative pauses its forward action to give a detailed description of the cage. When a literary work showcases the details of a visual art form, it is called ekphrasis. This type of description exists in literary works as old as Homer’s ancient Greek epic The Iliad, in which the filigree and figures on Achilles’s shield are described in elaborate detail. García Márquez’s description of the cage highlights the act of looking and evaluating, which the characters of the story constantly engage in as they determine who has wealth, status, and value in the community. It also emphasizes the unique beauty of the cage and the skill its creation required, heightening the stakes of Balthazar’s payment.
Omniscient Narrator
Information about the characters, their histories, and their actions reaches the reader through a third-person omniscient narrator. An omniscient narrator knows everything about the action and scenes of a story, and can impart information to the audience that the characters themselves do not know or cannot see. This technique was used in many 19th-century realist works, in which narration moralized the conflicts and drama of stories to impart the writer’s views. Here, the omniscient narrator suggests a parable or fairy tale, but García Márquez complicates that simple story structure with his use of magical realism, the story’s five-act structure, and its anti-climactic ending.
Circular Storytelling
Circular narratives often contain flashes of good fortune that later disappear. At the beginning of this story, Balthazar is a man of modest means, relatively unknown, with a small carpentry business to his name. His fate appears to be static and unchanging. When he creates the greatest birdcage he has ever constructed, the stir caused by his work seems about to change his fate, elevating Balthazar’s position in his community and opening new financial avenues for him. However, by the end of the story, Balthazar has less money than he had at the start, and his fame fades quickly from public consciousness. García Márquez’s circular structure reflects postmodernist narrative structures that became common after World War II. Artists and playwrights including Samuel Shepherd, Albert Camus, and Bertolt Brecht employed circular story structures to explore humankind’s helplessness in the face of entropy and chaos.
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By Gabriel García Márquez
