Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Third Resignation

After reading some of Marquez's work it became clear to me he has a fascination with death. I still don't know much about his personal background, but if I had to guess he must have had a very interesting life. Maybe a conflict with religion or maybe many family members dead. In the Eyes of a Blue Dog, the story begins with the description of a man struggling to move. He writes how he wants to squeeze his temples and how he wishes he could catch a cat. The language is very descriptive and vivid. It was kind of hard to decipher that the person being described was dead for a while. At first, it is clear there is some sort of paralysis holding the person back but its not that clear whether it is physical or mental. While the narrator of the story is seemingly dead, he seems to have a grip on everything going around him. He mentions the stench of the rotting corpse and the sounds of the dishwasher. The boys mother orders him an extra large coffin for him to "grow" into. I don't know if maybe this is a cultural or a religious tradition, but I found this part hard to understand. I took it literally at first thinking maybe the boy was on some sort of life support and wasn't actually dead, then i thought that maybe he is dead and his mother bought a large coffin to take away the pain of  small boy dying...Not really sure. Then, the last paragraph of the story changed everything for me. I thought that maybe the narrator was someone looking at a coffin realizing that could be them. The story was complicated and hold deep meaning. I believe that after more research on Marquez and applying his life to this story will make it easier to understand and help me derive more meaning from it.