In his short story The Handsomest Drowned Man we see the transformation of a fishing village when a dead body washes up on shore. The story starts off children who find the body and how they began interact with a body as if it were a toy. Men living in the village notice and take his corpse back to someone house. They note that he is ordinarily tall and his was is obscure. However they concluded that these finding were the result …show more content…
The story ends with the village residents giving the dead man a funeral. Once his body is thrown off the bridge; there is a sense of change in the village to build a better village in order to attract more people like the dead man to the village.
Through this story we can see a clear theme of admiration. All the villagers that came into contact with the body had some sort of awe of the corpse. We can see the effect that his washed up body has on the village because toward the end of the story there a urgency to make the village a better place. Even though the man was death he still had the power of transforming lives. The twist in this story is that the villagers transformation comes from within and their own desires. We see that this incident brings together a village that was in isolation.
I also noticed that the sea or things relating to the sea are common elements throughout the story for example the children mistaking the body for a whale, his smell, when the woman remove sea weed from his hair. I took this to mean that the man is an object of the sea , it is almost like he is a mythical creature that doesn’t belong to the village. The way that he is described makes me lives outside the world of