Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Of These Days

In only three short years of bloody battle between Colombia’s Liberal and Conservative parties, the Thousand Days’ War tallied over 100,000 losses to fellow countrymen. This civil war heavily influenced a short story written over half a century later. The author’s grandfather, a colonel in the war, shaped the writer’s liberal political ideologies at an early age, as evidenced in the story. In the first few paragraphs of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One of These Days,” the author uses rich imagery, foreshadowing, and symbolism to illustrate the way an average citizen can take a stand against his government, just as the Liberals revolted against the Conservative Party of Colombia.
The opening paragraphs of the story are laden with imagery, which
For example, Marquez starts the story off by immediately telling the reader “Monday dawned warm and rainless,” (para 1). The rainless weather symbolizes Aurelio’s stubborn longing for revenge on mayor for “our twenty dead men” (para 29) at first. A lack of rain suggests a lack of change, and no water means no new rebirth, no change of heart. However, the reader can see a reversal through the same symbol of rain later on, when Escovar “went on working with the idea that before lunch it would rain again,” (para 3), indicating he was beginning to have second thoughts about harming the mayor, fearing he’d become the same type of person as the mayor. The “fistful of instruments” (para 1) is a symbol of Aurelio’s pent-up rage over the mayor’s past wrongdoings. His instruments could have been described in many other ways aside from “fistful,” but this aggressive word is symbolic of Escovar’s feelings toward the government. Finally, the gold tooth represents the revenge of Aurelio Escovar. He spends time “polishing” it (para 8), representative of the time he has spent thinking about and planning his revenge for the twenty dead men. He takes a meticulous amount of time making sure everything works out according to plan, and in the end he