A Sense of Time Wasted (Productively) Anchors October’s Graphic Novels
Credit…Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times Can you redeem wasted time by making art out of it? That’s the question the
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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers’ is a 1949 short story by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. Published when he was just twenty-two years old, it is one of his earliest stories. It’s also one of his shortest, running to just four pages. Narrated by the three sleepwalkers of the title, the story recounts how a woman fell from a second-storey window and, thereafter, retreated into herself, becoming a kind of living corpse. The story is a bleak exploration of a life without purpose or meaning, in which a character wills herself to disappear while still living. Summary The story is told either by one of the three sleepwalkers (on behalf of himself and the other two) or by all three, adopting a collective voice (as this is a Gabriel García Márquez story, the latter is perfectly possible). The story concerns a woman (who probably lives with the three men) who has been withdrawn and isolated for a number of years. The woman tells the three sleepwalkers that she will never smile again, and they believe her. She has taken to sitting on the cold floor in a dark corner, alone. The narrator confides that the three of them (are they brothers to the woman, or even her sons?) lack the courage to want her to be released from her life and slip away into death. Instead, they want to keep her in this ‘glacial’ state of suspension or death-in-life. The narrator recalls the night some years ago when the woman fell out of a second-storey window and landed on the courtyard outside with her face in the earth. They had lifted her up and the men had observed how her organs seemed ‘loose’, as if she were a ‘lukewarm corpse’ before rigor mortis sets in. The woman is unable to recall how she ended up out in the courtyard, but she mentions hearing a cricket chirping as if it were about to demolish the wall of her room. One night, she fell asleep leaning against the wall, because she was convinced the cricket […]
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Credit…Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times Can you redeem wasted time by making art out of it? That’s the question the
Tatiana Schlote-Bonne. — photo by Jordon Walter On the day of the release of her debut, Such Lovely Skin, Tatiana
