Oxford Book of Caribbean Short

¶ … Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories

The three stories to be reviewed, compared and analyzed in this paper are: "Encarnacion Mendoza's Christmas Eve" (by Juan Bosch); "The Light on the Sea" (by John Wickham); and "The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship" (by Gabriel Garcia Marquez).

Similarities and Differences between the Ghost Ship and Mendoza

All three stories are quite different, with characters that seem to have very little in common. But two stories, Encarnacion Mendoza's story (which I will refer to in this paper as "Mendoza") and the Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship (which I will refer to as "Ghost Ship") have the strong theme of death in common. The two characters, Mendoza and the narrator from Ghost Ship are very different characters, and the overall plots and themes are very different but death and fear and tragedy are parts of the story.

The context of Mendoza is a paradox, because Mendoza is on the run from the police for a murder he is accused of, it is Christmas Eve, one of the holiest days of the year, and he is trying to get to see his wife Nina. Nowhere in this story is Mendoza trying to prove his innocence, all he is trying to do is get close to his family for Christmas Eve. Mendoza has been on the run for six months and since everyone in the community knows him and knows what he looks like, he has to stay hidden.

The Mendoza story takes place in one day, Christmas Eve, but the Ghost Ship story takes place apparently over several years. Year after year on the same date, the narrator can see the silent massive ocean liner -- that is taller than the crash into the rocks and yet there is never any evidence of a shipwreck. The Mendoza story is written in nice neat sentences and short paragraphs, the Ghost Ship is a bit hard to follow because it is literally all one sentence. The reader has to struggle through the Ghost Ship, and keep going back to make sure nothing was missed because of the constant commas.

The Mendoza story has an explanation for almost everything that occurs in the plot. Readers know that Mendoza is accused of killing a man and that he is wanted for murder and desperately hiding out to avoid capture so he can see his wife and family. Readers know that he hides in the cane fields for a specific reason; readers know that the little boy with the dog that discovered him did not know he was alive, and instead thought he was dead. Readers know why Mendoza moves from one field to the next, and why he lay down and put his hat over his face (to avoid being recognized).

But readers do not know that the little boy who alerted authorities to Mendoza was his own son. It is horrifying at the end of the story, when Mendoza's blood and mud-soaked body is dumped in the front of his wife's house, that readers learn it was his own son that was his undoing.

The Ghost ship story is mysterious, the opposite of the Mendoza story. Readers do not know if the narrator is really seeing a huge ocean liner, or if he was having hallucinations or if it was a dream. We do not know why after being a widow for eleven years, the narrator's mother is still thinking often about her dead husband and why the "blood in her heart bubbled up and turned into chocolate."

The Light on the Sea (referred to as "The Light") compared with both other stories.

The Light is a very interesting and uncomplicated story. The light that shines on the sea is something Mr. Farley never saw until his sister died and he had to move because he could not cook for himself. So death for Mr. Farley opens the door to light.

In all three stories death has an important role to play. Mr. Farley has never seen much light (because his house was in the woods and the light only trickled into his living space through the heavy vegetation) until his sister died and he moved to a place that had a view of the ocean. In Ghost Ship the narrator's father was dead and his mother wore out a rocking chair missing him, then she died and the narrator was anxious to have people recognize him as a person who told the truth. In Mendoza, the protagonist is trying to stay alive against all odds, and in the end he is killed and his body brutally carried on a donkey's back in the rain to the place he had intended to visit while alive, his wife's house.

The effort to stay hidden for Mendoza in some ways is like the Ghost Ship story, because the big liner is hidden from everyone but the narrator (readers don't know his name). Mendoza is hidden from everything but his own son and his son's dog. There is death in the Ghost Ship story, as the narrator's father is dead and his mother dies during the story. His mother goes to town to get something so she can be more comfortable while she is thinking about her dead husband. With the boy's mother and father dead, he seeks to establish an identity in the story, that is why he keeps saying "Now they're going to see who I am."

In the Ghost Ship, when the beacon shines on the ship every 15 seconds, it disappears. Then the liner reappears when the beacon leaves the ship, and in the Light, the ocean is illuminated with light every time Mr. Farley looks out there. Light is a good thing in the Light, but in Ghost Ship light blots out what the narrator is trying to get people to believe in.

Dark Images are present in all three stories -- what purpose do they serve?

There are many dark passages and images in Ghost Ship, more so than in the other two combined. They serve a purpose, although what that purpose is cannot always be identified. The reader can speculate on what the meaning is for many of the things that are described in the story. For example, it is possible the phantom ship is linked to the narrator's mother and father, or that the ship is where dead people go, including his family. But why so many gross passages, like: "three hundred thousand tons of shark smell passing so close to the boat"; "A whole world of drowned animals floated" (in the ocean, and later they sank to the bottom); his mother was "half rotted away" (from a snakebite); "Dutch Negroes in orthopedic velocipedes" (velocipedes are self-propelled vehicles that railroad maintenance people use to check the tracks); "copper-skinned Malayans could roast filets of Brazilian women" (in a secret tavern). This is the only reference to cannibalism in the story, but it is disgusting and dark. On the other hand this place is strange and used by smugglers to ship parrots overseas

Now why would the author include so many bizarre and really disgusting phrases and descriptions, unless he wanted to stir the reader's interest or maybe just create such a strange story that no one could ever figure out what it was really about? Also, the author of Ghost Ship presents contrasting images in the same sentence, the effect being confusion on the part of the reader. For example, when he writes about "the sweet fragrance of gardenias and rotten salamanders" -- are both the gardenias and rotten salamanders sweet-smelling? It leaves one wondering. And why was the chair that his mother died in considered a "murderous chair" -- a chair that had been used "over the centuries" but all its "faculty for giving rest had been used up" -- and he was then blamed for bringing it into the village and it caused the death of four women?

We know that the narrator in Ghost Ship was eager to have the people in the village see him as something other than the "orphan who was pointed out by everyone as the son of the widow who had brought the throne of misfortune into the village…" and he did shout for people to come and see the "behemoth beast" and for that he was "covered" with blows, beaten badly because no one could see what he saw.

In Mendoza, there were dark images as well, but they were understandable and reasonably presented. The setting when Mendoza was trying to sneak his way back to his wife was one of tension and fear. But even though it would mean his death if he was caught, there was a "blind force" the drove him on towards his wife; it was an "animal impulse" that "drove him on." He "obeyed his instinct" and paid the price, and once found, the bizarre scene unfolded of drunken soldiers yelling, firing bullets into the cane fields even though they couldn't see anything there. They were zigzagging through the sugar cane field, a truly bizarre scene.

Also in Mendoza, it is a dark and evil scene as Mendoza's body is tied to the back of a donkey but the body kept sliding down under the donkey ("ass"). There is no respect for the dead here in this scene, and to take his bloody, muddy, and wet body to his wife's house, and throw it down in the threshold -- that is profoundly evil. He never had a chance, and now his family has to pay the price. The evil and "horrible grimace" that was on the face of the dead Mendoza must have been a terrible shock to his family and his children. His son (who had found what he thought was a corpse) now saw a real corpse, ironically the person he had seen earlier and mistaken for a corpse -- his own father!

There were dark scenes in the Light, as well. The narrator found those hundreds of canvases "frightening" -- like "creatures bred of the dark shadows of the cellar and never seeing the light." The narrator, as a student of Mr. Foley's back in the day, was glad to get back upstairs and out of that murky basement with all the paintings. Even the setting in the woods was dark and forbidding. No sun could get through. That's sure sign that the author is painting a picture of something bleak or uncomfortably dark.