Fiction or reality? Gabriel García Márquez’s Relato de un náufrago sociological value

Abstract

There are works that are not born with literary vocation, but they eventually end up in literature. This is what happens in Relato de un náufrago, a short novel by Gabriel García Márquez since its appearance with that title in 1970. Beforehand, the text had appeared in the form of newspaper reporting in fourteen deliveries in the Bogotá newspaper El Espectador. There is no difference in content between both texts, but the “Prologue” that precedes the edition of 70 is very significant: it provides data on the character that belies the image that it was in 1955; enumerates the reasons for the sinking, which splashed and overthrew the dictator Rojas Pinilla; says what happened with the hero, and suggests the reasons why that text was published as a book fifteen years later. The reading of the work is different as read or not this “Prologue”. This paper reveals the sociological literature value: a historical event that becomes fictional, and that from his position as a literary object, influences then in reality. The paper will analyze all these aspects and literary elements of narrative and those that link it to the reality.