One Of These Days

Gabriel García Márquez is best known for his use of magical realism—a literary genre in which fabulous or fantastical events are narrated as commonplace in a realistic narrative tone—in short stories like “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” or his Nobel-prize-winning 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. However, the narrative style of his early literary works, like “One Of These Days,” draws upon the conventions of Neorealism to critique contemporary social realities.

Neorealism (sometimes also called Social Realism) was developed in Italian film and literature at the end of the 1940s and throughout the 1950s in response to the decline of Fascism. The movement spread throughout Europe and Latin America during the 1950s and 1960s. Neorealism (neo meaning new) represents a rebirth of realistic or true-to-life narratives in both film and fiction. Two hallmarks of neorealist works are that they present scenes from everyday life and that they focus on social realities, reflecting the lived experiences of the majority rather than those of the privileged few (Buchanan, Ian. “Neorealism.” A Dictionary of Critical Theory 2nd ed. Oxford UP, 2018). García Márquez became familiar with Neorealism during the mid-1950s when he spent time in Europe, particularly in Italy, as a newspaper correspondent and film critic.

His two best known neorealist novels are In Evil Hour and No One Writes To The Colonel. The vignette of a dentist extracting an infected tooth from an oppressive, unnamed mayor without the use of anesthesia, which is the main plot of the short story “One Of These Days,” appears in slightly different versions in both In Evil Hour and No One Writes To The Colonel. All three accounts of the dentist and the Mayor draw upon the conventions of Neorealism by depicting a scene from everyday life, emphasizing the protagonist’s poverty and demonstrating how the protagonist navigates life in an unjust and inequitable world. In all three of these literary works, the main characters live, resist, and try to survive in a corrupt and repressive society.

The subjects of neorealist works are people who lack wealth and power and who are struggling under an oppressive social and political structure, like the protagonist of “One Of These Days.” Aurelio Escovar is an impoverished, working-class man. His low social status is evident in his lack of a formal education, the disrepair of his office workspace, and his lack of clients other than the Mayor. The short story focuses on one day in Aurelio’s life and zooms in on the hours he spends doing monotonous work, meticulously polishing false teeth, before presenting his conflict with the Mayor. Despite the fact that he initially protests having to serve the Mayor, it is clear in the narrative that Aurelio is not in a position to refuse the Mayor service. Although the narrative provides few details about the society in which Aurelio lives, the Mayor holds complete authority—equating himself with the town—and is, from the protagonist’s standpoint, responsible for unjustifiable violence, specifically the deaths of 20 of Aurelio’s compatriots.