Comparison/Contrast Essay

Topics: Gabriel García Márquez, Latin America, Race and Ethnicity Pages: 2 (815 words) Published: March 20, 2013
Comparison/Contrast Essay

Although both Clarice Lispector's "The Smallest Woman in the World" and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" are magic realist stories showing the extreme sizes of two people, the stories depict differently how a society can react to a certain type of person. Through scenery and physical description, the authors show that different types of people can be loved or hated by a society.

Marquez's text starts off with children seeing a large being in the water. The children think "it was an enemy ship" which can prove that the large size of a person can be very intimidating at first. Opposite to Marquez's text, in Lispector's text, the smallest woman is greeted with friendliness, she was immediately named by the French explorer. This can prove that the small size of the woman can be seen as less intimidating than a larger person. However, in both stories, the characters are suddenly treated differently once they have been displayed to a larger crowd. Once the seaweed is removed from the drowned man, the children start to play with the man and are less afraid of him. Also once the woman of the village see the man, they seem to fall madly in love with him. They treat him almost like a god. In contrast, in Lispector's text the people that read the article about the smallest woman in the world, they seem to dislike the idea of her size. The townspeople want her to be their slave or their toy. I think that the difference in size can be seen in both a literal and figurative sense. Literally the large size of the man is what the woman see as a physical appeal to them while the small size of the woman is seen more a "creepy" or "strange" aspect of her appearance. However, I also believe that the size of the characters is used as symbolism. For example, we can see that the large size of the man could represent authority and power and this may be why the men of the village feel intimidated my him. It could also...
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