The collected stories by:Heidy Tejeda

Garcia Marquez employs magic realism primarily as a means of criticizing social and religious forms throughout her stories. In the collected stories, Marques uses binaries such as reality and fallacy as a way to illustrate people’s attitudes on religion and social issues. This imaginative style combines realistic, everyday details with elements of fantasy, blurring the reader's usual distinctions between reality and magic. In the “Monologue of Isabel watching it rain in Moncado” the pregnant narrator, Isabel and her family encounters a rain storm after attending Mass on Sunday morning. On page 91, Isabel described it as, “I saw my father sitting in a rocker, his painful vertebrae resting on a pillow and his eyes lost in the labyrinth of the rain.”
Marquez uses the rain to signify the power religion holds on people. The rain storm started right after attending church on Sunday. This supernatural Rain had Godlike powers. No one knew where it came from but it was present. On page 90 it stated, “But without noticing it, the rain was penetrating too deeply into our senses.” It was a like a tree above all other trees. Rain is thought out to be good for crops and the environment. However, too much rain can destroy a city as we are experiencing in Peru. In my opinion, the rain depicted the bad implications religion have on people. How we depend on it.
· “It doesn’t look as if it will ever clear, and when I looked toward the voice I found only the empty chair.” I almost feel like it has a sense of Godlike features, how he’s not visible but present. “Never clear”, probably means I’ll always be here.
· “ We were paralyzed, drugged by the rain, given over to collapse of nature with a peaceful and resigned attitude.” (pg. 92) Is the way we feel about religion, we no longer try and understand why God let things happen we simply let it happen and we believe that everything happens for a reason.
· “In the men’s expression, in the very diligence with which they were working, one could see the cruelty of their frustrated rebellion, of their necessary and humiliating inferiority to the rain.”(pg.93) Social issues such as men and their ego’s. “Man of the house” is an expression that is commonly known to be used to describe the perceptions and expectations held by men in society.
· Martin responded to his wife’s comment as, “That’s something you made up. Pregnant women are always imagining things” (pg. 95) blame it on the pregnancy, typical men move. Shows the lack of understanding women.
“A very old man with enormous wings” As an allegory, Marquez's story certainly has both literal and symbolic levels. On the literal level, there is the narrative of a desperate family whose illness and poverty are resolved by the appearance of what they call an angel. On a symbolic level the Marquez uses the binary natural and supernatural to illustrate how diverse people embrace difference in this case “supernatural” occurrences. Angels are viewed to be beautiful, young, and with lovely wings. However, in this case he was an old man with missing teeth. In addition, when the spider woman was presented, people were fascinated with her story and accepted it. They did not accept the old man because the old man does not tell us anything about himself and the people do not like that. They assume many different types of things about the old man and leave it at that.
“The sea of lost time” focused more on criticizing social and political structures. Marquez uses the binary of time and space throughout this story. Esteban (the drowned man) symbolizes inspiration and change. It is the same inspiration that drives one person to change his life; the inspiration that motivates people to connect to others; the inspiration that brings ones curiosity, and makes one a better person as a result of it. Esteban represents a moment in our existence when we are mysteriously touched by a sense of change and want, belonging, love, and inspiration that makes us want to change.