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.
Essay Topics
Describe the landscape that García Márquez creates in “Death Constant Beyond Love.” What are its main features? What is the difference between the desert and the sea, and how do they shape the way that Sanchez thinks about the world?
Discuss the theme of imprisonment in García Márquez’s story. Who is imprisoned? By what?
Find the spaces in the text where characters look or fix their eyes upon someone or something. What is the role of eyes in this story? What do they enable or suggest?
Nature, and artificial nature, appear constantly throughout the text. What does the story suggest about how nature works? What, for you, does it uncover about the difference between “real” and “artificial” worlds?
Revisit the passages about Nelson Farina. Why does García Márquez include passages about Nelson’s past? What is his role in Sanchez and Laura’s relationship?
Think through the idea of the unmentionable, or the unmentioned, in this text. What do characters choose not to tell others? What does the narrator choose not to tell the reader? Why might García Márquez create these absences? Establish a general theory of how missing information works to shape the way one reads this text.
Related Titles
By Gabriel García Márquez
