No One Writes to the Colonel by Gabriel García Márquez

First published:El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, 1961 (English translation, 1968)

Type of plot: Ironic realism

Time of work: October to December, 1956

Locale: An unnamed village in Colombia

Principal Characters:

• The colonel, a poverty-stricken retired soldier
• His wife, an ailing and cantankerous woman
• Don Sabas, a grasping and unscrupulous businessman
• The Doctor, a kindly physician

The Novel

The plot of this short novel is quite simple. The elderly and impoverished colonel has been waiting for fifteen years to receive a pension check for his service in the army. The cultural context of the story is during what is known as la violencia, a civil war between liberals and conservatives in Colombia that lasted from the late 1940’s into the 1960’s. Nine months previous to the opening of the story, the colonel’s son, Agustín, had been killed at a cockfight for distributing secret political literature. The colonel is torn between his desire to keep his son’s prizefighting cock in order to enter it into the cockfights in January and his need to sell it to provide food for himself and his wife. The story focuses primarily on the colonel’s pride in trying to conceal his indigent state and his often ironic and bitterly humorous response to his situation.

The central metaphors in the story are the pension, which never arrives, but for which the colonel never ceases to hope, and the fighting cock, which also represents hope, as well as his son’s, and thus the whole village’s, political rebellion. In desperation, he does decide to sell the cock to the exploiter Sabas, who gives him considerably less money than he originally promised. When the villagers snatch the bird and enter it in the trial fights and the colonel sees that it lives up to its reputation as a prizefighter, he decides to give the money back and keep the bird. Even though his wife nags him to change his mind, he holds out, realizing that the animal belongs to the whole community. When his wife asks him what they will eat until the time of the cockfights, he replies with an expletive that ends the story.

Although the story is lacking in plot—mainly concerned as it is with the colonel’s stoic pride, his wife’s nagging, the venality of Sabas, the tense political situation of a people under martial law—the character of the colonel sustains the reader’s interest. The atmosphere of the story is also arresting, for it seems summed up by the colonel’s intestinal complaints—“the colonel experienced the feeling that fungus and poisonous lilies were taking root in his gut”—and his wife’s remark—“We’re rotting alive.”

Moreover, no summary of the events of the story can adequately account for the sense of a fully contained fictional world created here—a world as completely realized as that of William Faulkner, one of García Márquez’s admitted influences. It is not the plot that makes this story powerful, but rather the combination of understated realism with a sense of a folklore reality that creates a unique combination which has been called “magical realism” by some critics. Although there is little background for the simple events which make up the story, García Márquez’s recognized masterpiece, Cien años de soledad (1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970), provides a complete picture of the mysterious world of superstition, fantasy, and stark reality which the colonel inhabits. Finally, what characterizes the story is the understated style of the third-person limited point of view, which filters the fictional world through the mind of the characters, and the laconic speech of the colonel, who, innocent though he may be, is wise in his stoic acceptance of an immediate reality that he cannot change and an ultimate reality that he can only encounter with wit and wry humor.

The Characters

The colonel is not only the protagonist of the novel, he is the novel, for it is his humor and irony, his pride and courage against the inexplicable adversity of poverty and political repression, that give the novel dignity and structure. This wise yet childlike man assumes a sort of tragicomic stature in the course of the narrative. Although he goes to wait for the mail boat every Friday with hopeful expectation, his resigned response is always the same: “No one writes to the colonel.” Although he is often self-effacing, reconciled to the repressive regime which controls his life, he maintains his pride. For example, he does not wear a hat so, as he says, “I don’t have to take it off to anyone.”

He is both idealistic and ironic, a combination that makes him memorable in contemporary fiction. When his wife says that he is only skin and bones, he replies that he is taking care of himself so he can sell himself: “I’ve already been hired by a clarinet factory.” When his wife laments that the mush they are eating is from corn left over from the rooster, and says, “That’s life,” the colonel replies, “Life is the best thing that’s ever been invented.” In some ways, the colonel resembles the existential hero as described by Albert Camus—holding out no hope for transcendent value but maintaining a kind of stoic acceptance of struggle regardless of the outcome. In modern fiction, his closest parallel is Ernest Hemingway’s fisherman, Santiago, in The Old Man and the Sea (1952). Although the colonel has nothing so tangible as a great fish with which to do battle, he is no less an example of a man who sustains “grace under pressure.”

The colonel’s wife, who alternates between being bedridden because of her asthma and being hyperenergetic, is more realistic about their situation than the colonel is and urges him to sell the rooster. She has less pride also, having no qualms about going about the village trying to barter household items for food. Finally, she says that she is fed up with resignation and dignity, and she bitterly tells the colonel, “You should realize that you can’t eat dignity.” The colonel has hope, however, about which he says, “You can’t eat it, but it sustains you.”

Sabas is the only leader of the colonel’s party who has escaped persecution; he has aligned himself with the established political order and continues to live in the town and to prosper, primarily by exploiting the hunger and want of the rest of the villagers. Other minor characters are a doctor who tends to the colonel’s wife and belongs to the underground resistance movement, the town’s corrupt mayor, a shiftless lawyer whom the colonel has hired to try to get his pension money, and Father Angel, a priest who exhibits no real moral leadership for the community. All of these minor figures are but supporting players for the central role of the proud, yet self-effacing colonel, who deals with all adversities, large and small, with his sharp, ironic humor.

Critical Context

García Márquez has said in interviews that his characteristic storytelling style is the style of his grandmother, and that some of his best characters are patterned after his grandfather, whom he calls the most important figure in his life. Discussing literary influences, he has acknowledged his debt to Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway—all of whom lie behind the style of No One Writes to the Colonel.

Although García Márquez is a novelist, working within that genre’s basically mimetic pattern, his style is that of the modern romancer; it is lyric rather that realistic, highly polished and self-conscious rather than concerned only with mere external reality. His characters exist not in an “as-if” real world, but rather in a purely fictional world of his own making—a combination of the folklore conventions of his South American heritage and the realism of the great modernist writers. The result is that reality is seen as more problematic and inexplicable than everyday experience would suggest.

That his fictions take place in a political culture that seems unstable and adrift is not so thematically important as the fact that this unorganized social world makes possible his exploration of reality as governed by inexplicable forces. Thus, his characters, deprived of the props of established social order, have only their most elemental and primal virtues to sustain them. He is a metaphysical and poetic writer, not a propagandist or a social realist.

García Márquez, primarily because of the popular and critical reception of One Hundred Years of Solitude, is perhaps the best-known writer in the Latin American explosion of talent that has taken place since the 1960’s. Others in this modern tradition are Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and José Donoso—all of whom have created their own version of a Kafkaesque modernist world which has fascinated general readers and critics alike. No One Writes to the Colonel is a minor masterpiece in this tradition, a precursor to the complexity and control of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Márquez. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. A collection of eighteen essays by various authors that have been written over several years on different aspects of Márquez’s works. Covers the whole range of literary criticism and offers in-depth analysis of several of Márquez’s novels.

Dolan, Sean. Hispanics of Achievement. New York: Chelsea House, 1994. A solid introduction to Márquez’s work, featuring photographs and quotations. Discusses Márquez’s family background, literary influences, and personal politics and how it shaped his writing.

García Márquez, Gabriel. Interview. UNESCO Courier 49 (February, 1996): 4-7. Márquez offers his views on the teaching and protection of culture. He also discusses his daily writing discipline and how it has influenced and enhanced his work. An informative and interesting interview.

McMurray, George R. “Gabriel García Márquez.” In Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria I. Abreau. Vol. 3. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. Offers a comprehensive and critical discussion of Márquez’s life and works. Provides a selected bibliography for further reading.

Styron, Rose. “Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Kenzaburo Oe: From the Rose Styron Conversations.” New Perspectives Quarterly 14 (Fall, 1997): 56-62. A revealing interview with three renowned authors. They share their views on topics such as women and power, first and lost love, journalism as literature, spirit and faith, and multiculturalism.