20 pages • 40 minutes read
Gabriel García MárquezDeath Constant Beyond Love
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1970A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Imprisonment
In the first lines of García Márquez’s story, readers learn Sanchez’s “sentence”: he has “six months and eleven days to go before his death” when he meets “the woman of his life” (Paragraph 1). Together, he and Laura are imprisoned in loneliness. Sanchez is aware, by the time he meets her, that he is “sentenced to a fixed term,” and he likes to keep that secret and suffer in silence (Paragraph 3).
Readers do not ever learn whether Sanchez receives the key from Laura’s father and “unlocks” her. The satisfaction of sex goes unfulfilled in the story; unlike Laura’s father, who cycles through women who die in the end, Sanchez may not ever consummate his relationship with Laura. What matters is both characters together, Laura fixated on the rose and Sanchez “[given] in to terror” (Paragraph 35).
Fate seems to control their temperaments—as Aries, the sign of solitude, is supposed to communicate—but it also controls their actions. Laura believes in “her fate” and the senator believes in the power of death (Paragraph 29). The two ideas seem to mean the same thing: both limit their bodies’ senses of autonomy. Fate, then, and forces beyond imagination are the imprisoning forces.
The Rose
The rose is the narrator’s great fixation. Laura picks up on this fixation. As a symbol across the story, the rose represents Sanchez’s descent into death, Laura’s beauty, and the function of nature at the same time. It looms over the room, even in darkness.
As a symbol of beauty, it is out of place, like “a kind of joke” as an import in a village named after roses (Paragraph 1). The rose rests in a glass of water to rest at the same time that Sanchez does; both need rejuvenation. By the time Laura sees it closely, the rose has “been tarnished by the saltpeter” (Paragraph 24). The imminent death and fading beauty of the rose both represents Sanchez’s fall and Laura’s possible loss of beauty.
Laura’s fixation on the rose—one assumes through the next six months—without speaking of it calls attention to the lack of access readers gain to Laura’s mind. She has learned what roses are “in Riohacha,” although readers (and presumably Sanchez himself) neither know nor care when or how she traveled to Riohacha (Paragraph 24). Like death, which calls attention to the repetitions in Sanchez’s life, the rose calls attention to the limitations of the reader’s (or any man’s) knowledge of the inner workings of Laura’s mind. But like Sanchez with water, the rose seems able to act on Laura even as it represents her.
Water and the Ocean
Water is both a distant view and a spectacle in the desert scenes of “Death Constant Beyond Love.” Initially, the narrator curiously describes the sea as “arid and without direction” (Paragraph 1). Sanchez seems to try to channel the ocean: just as Laura fixes her eyes on the rose, he fixes his “on the sea, which was sighing with heat.” He takes on the qualities of that “calm water” in his voice (Paragraph 4). The water is distant but close, and it seems to have performative power over the one who looks at it.
People work to recreate the water, too. The illusion of “an ocean line made of painted paper” is the backdrop to the “artificial city” the campaign travels with (Paragraph 8). Working to recreate something with power, the text suggests, only draws attention to how powerful the real thing is. After all, the water is what revitalizes Sanchez’s rose when he rests. Disillusioned by death, Sanchez notices the artifice more than he notices the representative or metaphorical power of water.
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