The last voyage of the ghost ship

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928- )

               

(This is a story of a boy who sees a ghost ship at night. Nobody believes the boy’s story even though the boy thinks he has really seen the ship. This story is written in the stream of consciousness style. Therefore, it is not divided into sentences or paragraphs. The whole story is one long continuous sentence.)

               

The boy says that now people will see who he is. They did not believe him in the past.

               

Many years ago, the boy saw the huge ship for the first time. He saw it at a night in March. The huge ship didn’t have any lights and it didn’t make any sound. It was moving towards the village. Something was broken on the ship, so it couldn’t find the correct path in the water. It hit rocks in the water, broke and sank to the bottom of the sea. Nobody heard any noise from the ship hitting the rocks and breaking.

               

The next day, the boy didn’t see anything unusual, so he thought that maybe he had only dreamed about the ship and it wasn’t real.

               

Exactly one year later, during the night, the boy saw the same ship again. This time he was sure that he was not dreaming. The boy told his mother about the ship he had seen. She did not believe her son. She thought that her son was going to be mad.

               

The boy’s father had died 11 years before. Since then, the mother had been spending her time sitting in a chair and thinking about her dead husband. Now the mother’s chair had become old. She needed to buy a different chair. She took a small boat to go to a place where she could buy a new chair. The boy went with his mother. While they were in the boat, the mother showed the boy that there was no broken ship at the bottom of the sea.

               

That night the mother died sitting in her new chair. After that four other women died while sitting in the same chair. The people in the village thought that the chair was bad and threw it into the sea. Now the boy had no parents. He had to steal fish so that he could have something to eat.

               

A few years later, on the same night in March, the boy was watching the sea again. He saw the same ship. He made a lot of noise to wake up the villagers to see the ship. But when the people got up the ship had already broken and gone to the bottom of the sea. The villagers didn’t see anything and did not believe that there was a ship. They beat the boy for making a disturbance and scaring them. The boy was angry at the villagers because they did not believe him. He made a plan to show them the ship so that they would believe him.

               

One year later, on the same night in March, the boy stole a small boat so that he could get near the big ship. He took the boat to the place where he had seen the ship in the past. When the ship arrived the boy lit a lamp in his boat. The big ship saw the light on his boat and began to follow him. The boy led the ship towards the village.

               

When the ship got close to the village, it blew its loud whistle. All of the people in the village woke up because of the loud noise and came out to their houses. The ship came into the ground by the village and stopped moving in front of the church. Now all the people in the village saw the ship and believed the boy. He felt happy.

(This is a symbolic story. The lantern is the symbol of revolutionary idea. The boy is a visionary rebel youth. The ship is the revolution in the form of the vision or dream of the boy.)