Marquez took advantage of what he calls Luis Alejandro Velasco’s “exceptional instinct for the art of narrative”, along with his inherent humility, lending him the unembellished voice and tone of the anti-hero.
Velasco’s chronological telling of his escapade directly launches into a structural and tonal pattern of persistence. Blunt, simple sentences often introduce or conclude a tightly bound paragraph, interspersed with several compound and complex sentences that add a reflective sense of depth. A sentence with one comma is followed by another with two, and then the pattern will repeat again, returning quickly to intense, bare-boned simplicity.
Marquez strictly avoids any impetus to philosophize (and unnecessarily distort) Velasco’s point of view. The plethora of shipmate personalities and common recreational pleasures of land and society are delivered up in immense detail compared to the lonely, single perspective that will follow after the shipwreck.
Marquez is faced with the challenge of drawing out Velasco’s mainly monotonous floating voyage in order to truly represent the agony of that long, isolated, death-defying entrapment, without losing the reader who may be rushing towards climactic relief. Short sections sum up days and nights in the patterns we come to expect; physical pain ebbs and flows, emotional stresses peak and decline, animals hover and lurk according to their routines, and the horizon shows unchanging resolve to be its ubiquitous self devoid of end points.
Marquez seems to employ the colon, and to a lesser degree the semicolon, to emphasize Velasco’s faltering capacities and general dumbfoundedness when he is constantly forced to consider his fate. In sentences like “If I found myself in the same predicament today, I would die of hopelessness: I now know that no ship travels the course on which my raft was bound”, and “For several reasons, that day was very different from the previous days: the sea was dark and calm; the sun, warm and tranquil, hugged by body; a gentle breeze guided the raft along; even my sunburn felt a bit better”, retrospection takes on elemental importance.
The colon is a forced pause and a gathering of strength as Velasco faces the most formidable subtleties of nature, including his own body. “Instantly I realized what was happening: the raft had overturned completely” makes moments of life and death hover, suspended in time as Velasco’s entire ordeal is. Raw, emotive revelations of dread and hopelessness are followed by the harsh validations of reality. This stylistic structure continuously re-leads the reader to the edge, propelled overboard once again.
In the end, that colon-induced propulsion into the sea becomes a heave towards land, and hope: “But ahead of the raft, in the half-light of dawn, I could make out a long, heavy shadow: against the bright sky I could see the outlines of coconut palms”. Something about the colon implies the conscious choice of holding one’s breath, and the weightiness of time.
Marquez achieves balance in his sentence and paragraph structure by sustaining a cyclical sense of routine amidst the reality of aimless drifting.
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