What topic would be the most interesting to read about in a personal essay?

Has anybody read IN Evil Hour by Gabriel Garcia Marquez? need to write essay. any suggestions about topic?

• i have writers block and need to write a 1500 word essay. due on the 21st.

• Answer:

  This work overview might help you generate some ideas. I've also included an overview of Marquez as a writer that may give you some ideas as well. Work Overview: In Evil Hour, by Gabriel García Márquez Author: Gabriel (jose) Garcia Marquez also known as: Gabriel (Jose) Garcia Marquez, Gabriel Jose Garcia Marquez, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Gabriel Jose Garcia-Marquez Date: 1979 Genre(s): Short stories; Novels; Journalism; Historical fiction; Experimental fiction; Film scripts; Family sagas In Evil Hour by Gabriel García Márquez is set in an unnamed Colombian river town during the 1950s; specific dates are not provided. The novel takes place during a break in La Violencia, a brutal time of anarchy between conservative and liberal parties. The text, reflecting the unrest of the setting, is fragmented and sets a tone of anxiety and uneasiness. The story opens with Father Ángel, a dedicated priest in the town, as he wakes to ring the church bell for morning mass. He encounters Trinidad, a layperson of the church, who has made catching mice her new priority. Because of the abundant fall rains and subsequent flooding, an infestation has developed in the church, so much so that dead mice have been found floating in the holy water font. As typical of the style of the text, the plot now shifts to a wealthy farmer named César Montero as he and his wife wake with the sound of the church bell. After dressing and saying goodbye to his wife, Montero walks to the home of the pastor, another layman in town. As the pastor finishes his morning clarinet playing, Montero kills him with a jaguar gun. This action is a direct result of one of the many recent lampoons, or posters, that have been displayed throughout the town and are plaguing the residents by spreading rumors of their sins. This particular lampoon stated that Montero's wife was having an affair with the pastor. At the crime scene the reader is introduced to the mayor, who, in spite of an almost debilitating toothache, is diligently trying to restore order to his town in the midst of governmental anarchy. As a result, he orders an autopsy along with the proper forms, both of which have never been done in the past. The mayor, however, is determined to "do things properly." He calls on Judge Arcadio to aid him in restoring this order; the judge, who spends most of his days napping or in the poolroom drinking beer, is slow to join him. Montero is taken to jail and awaits his trial, which will take place in another city. Father Ángel, too, recognizes a need for order and, following normal procedure, demands that the prisoner have a chance to confess. Chapter two provides a bit of history about the lampoons, which have been plaguing the town for an unknown but seemingly lengthy amount of time. The lampoon culprit, however, has not yet been discovered. The judge walks to the court building, enters his office, and sits at his desk, something he has not yet done in the eleven months that he has been in office. The judge and his secretary discuss the lampoons, which have already caused one death. The judge feels motivated to find the person responsible for them. The lampoons have also affected Roberto and Rebeca Asis, who live across the street from the court building. Rebeca tries to comfort her husband during siesta, but he is enraged over a lampoon that states that his daughter, Rebeca Isabel, is not his child. Roberto talks with his mother, the widow Asis, about the situation, and she reminds him that since they were the founding family of the town, they "seemed to have blood that was sweet for gossip." The Catholic Dames, too, the town's religious women's group, are concerned, and approach Father Ángel about it; he instructs the women to ignore this "voice of scandal." The following chapter opens with the mayor chewing more aspirin in an attempt to ease his mouth pain. Although a few people tell him to have the tooth removed, the mayor knows that the dentist will not perform the surgery, as the dentist is involved in the political struggle and rejects the town's government. The mayor's pain, however, is unbearable: "He lifted a stool above his head and flung it with all the might of his desperation against the glass case. . . 'Where are the analgesics?' he insisted." Finally, the mayor rounds up his three policemen and storms the dentist's home. He wakes the dentist and forces him at gunpoint to remove the abscessed tooth. The dentist complies as the rains continue to fall, causing some people to move their homes to higher ground. As he leaves, the mayor warns the dentist to cease his conspiratorial plans. In chapter four, the mayor and the judge plan the election of a deputy of the public ministry in a further attempt to improve the town. They agree, however, that the issue of the lampoons must come first. "It isn't the lampoons that won't let people sleep," says the secretary, "it's the fear of the lampoons." The constant waiting for the arrival of a new lampoon only worsens the already anxiety-ridden town. Details about the posters are discussed: "they'd been written with a brush in blue ink and in printed letters; the spelling was so absurd that the mistakes looked deliberate." One example of the abundant negative imagery used in the novel can be seen in the following scene, as Father Ángel speaks with the pregnant, common-law wife of Judge Arcadio. Father Ángel implores her to marry Arcadio, since she is carrying his child, but she refuses. As they are speaking, the priest looks out the window to the river, which has flooded due to incessant rain. He spies "a drowned cow, enormous . . . coming down along the streams of current, with several buzzards on top of it." Father Ángel resumes his pleas to the woman. In defense of her refusal of marriage, the young woman asserts that, despite her actions, "nobody has wasted his time putting any lampoon on my door . . . all the decent people on the square have theirs all papered up." She is stating that in spite of her pregnancy, her feelings and actions are honest and straightforward. The priest gives up on the woman. Father Ángel then calls on Montero, who awaits his departure to a trial in another city. He hears Montero's confession. The following day, as Montero boards the boat, the drowned cow can be seen from the dock: "A flock of buzzards scattered on the opposite shore, frightened by the waves from the launch. The stench of rottenness hung over the wharf." This rotting, putrid image continues to filter into scenes. At the urging of Father Ángel to take the matter of the lampoons seriously, the mayor reinstates an eight o'clock curfew, hoping to catch the lampoon culprit. Finally, there is a break in the case: a boy named Pepe Amador is caught and thrown in prison for distributing clandestine political literature. He tries to escape, but is captured and killed. This act ends the break of La Violencia, and the bloodshed that has been brewing in town for months returns. The violence comes almost as a relief because the political revolution is now out in the open. The novel ends as the rains stop and a new day begins. Source: "In Evil Hour," in Literature Resource Center, Gale Research, 1999. Source Database: Literature Resource Center WRITER OVERVIEW: Gabriel García Márquez: Overview Critic: Regina Janes Source: Reference Guide to World Literature, 2nd ed., edited by Lesley Henderson, St. James Press, 1995 Criticism about: Gabriel (jose) Garcia Marquez (1928-), also known as: Gabriel (Jose) Garcia Marquez, Gabriel Jose Garcia Marquez, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gabriel Jose Garcia-Marquez Genre(s): Short stories; Novels; Journalism; Historical fiction; Experimental fiction; Film scripts; Family sagas Novelist, story-teller, polemical journalist, recipient of the Nobel prize for literature, the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez has been among the most influential of 20th-century Latin American writers. Appearing at the crest of `the Boom' in Latin American literature in the 1960s, his novel, Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), made `magic realism' a common critical term, and the novel still generates imitators from Chile to London, Bombay to Massachusetts. Definitively postmodern in its self-referentiality, its foregrounding of the act of writing, and its temporal warps, the book is also firmly grounded in the Colombian-Venezuelan regionalist tradition, a wider Latin American tradition of fantastic literature, and in the typically American project of national self-definition in the face of an imperial past and present cultural diversity. Simultaneously an account of a nation, a town, a family, a house, and a book, the novel tells an episodic and realistic story of development and decline, remarkable for the sheer quantity of story-telling it accommodates. Instead of a single plot line taking a few characters through hundreds of pages, a seemingly inexhaustible invention produces story after story through some six generations. Always precisely individuated, episodes and characters parallel and contrast with each other, creating constantly shifting, intricate patterns within a lucid, accessible narrative. If the novel's fecundity violates expectations, so do its events. Brought back are episodes conventionally excluded by the rationalist criteria which, developing in the 17th and 18th centuries along with the novel, had separated the novel from the romance. The effect is to interrogate the reader's sense of possibility, to put into question what constitutes reality. Creating a town, Macondo, where it seems almost any- thing can happen, García Márquez's new epic narrator re-integrates events for long ruled out as too bizarre because they do not happen at all (virgins rising into the heavens holding onto the family sheets, or men returning from the dead), because they are no longer believed to happen (priests who levitate or magicians who return from the dead), or because although they may happen, they fail to fit into dominant rationalist categories (Aristotle's possible improbabilities, such as a rain of dead birds or a plague of butterflies). Effecting a radical defamiliarization, García Márquez also makes appear wonderful events or objects that modernity takes for granted and that no longer seem strange (the original sense of `magic realism' in art criticism), such as the television or a block of ice. Nor are the inventions ever entirely arbitrary: the most immediately accessible ones create patterns of cultural history, economic development, or political conflict, which are usually satirical, but occasionally pathetic or sentimental. Many create powerful symbols, readily transferrable to other contexts, such as a plague of insomnia inducing forgetfulness of words and their referents. Creating an alternative to the conventions of social or psychological realism and modernist fragmentation, the novel represents a world on the cultural margin without condescending to it as primitive, mythologizing it as nobly mysterious, or pitying it as deprived. As fiction, it is clearly a much livelier, more stimulating, more historically and politically conscious work than most of the American and European fiction of its period. From his earliest short stories, García Márquez has manifested his impatience with `meat-and-potatoes' realism. The earliest fictions evoke dreams, doubles, and ghosts, altered states of consciousness, `real' hallucinations, in stories that omit, or barely allude to, their most crucial concern. Under the helpfully foreign influence of Faulkner and Hemingway, he turned to more realistic representations and subjects, to social history and politics: the history of a family and town in the Faulknerian monologues of Là hojarasca (Leaf Storm), or of a town and La violencia (the major Colombian political conflict of the mid-20th century) in the intercut episodic structure of La mala hora (In Evil Hour), and in the spare short stories of Los funerales de la Mamá Grande (Big Mama's Funeral). In some of the stories of that volume, and in the short novel El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (No One Writes to the Colonel), García Márquez discovered the power of humour and ironic juxtaposition to both relieve and intensify the oppressive political atmosphere he communicates. Through One Hundred Years of Solitude, El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch), La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira ... (Innocent Erendira), and some short stories, García Márquez deployed the fantastic or impossible element often taken to characterize his fiction, and then abandoned it. This abandonment is characteristic of García Márquez. In addition to the inventiveness and originality of his fictional fabling, he is a master craftsman, intent on locating unique shapes or structures for each fiction. While certain stylistic features remain constant (and have become perhaps too habitual for the writer himself: the winds of disillusion waft too frequently), he works very hard not to give his readers what many of them may want: a hundred One Hundred Years of Solitudes. Each work develops a distinct structural principle. One Hundred Years of Solitude depends on the making of a book through the destruction of the town, family, and house that are the subjects of the book; The Autumn of the Patriarch on the swirl of voices and constant resurrections that constitute the power of dictators and their eternal, invasive presence; Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold) on the predictive shape of classical Greek tragedy; El amor en los tiempos del cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera) on an impossible openness established by the refusal to close off the fiction; El general en su laberinto (The General in His Labyrinth) on a journey to an ending that attempts to start again but cannot. As Phil West has observed, myths always provide a second chance; history never does. Suggesting an ambiguous relationship with history and fiction, García Márquez's fictions characteristically provide second chances in the body of the fiction, but deny them at the end, as the fiction moves into the reader's history. Often humorous, at times bitterly ironic or grotesque, occasionally tinged with pathos, García Márquez's work possesses a rare power of invention. Deficient in the psychological and linguistic density characteristic of some modern writers, García Márquez at his best achieves continuous surprise in the elaboration of a rococo, tessellated prose surface that makes the reader aware of the simultaneous insistence and insufficiency of interpretation. Source: Regina Janes, "Gabriel García Márquez: Overview" in Reference Guide to World Literature, 2nd ed., edited by Lesley Henderson, St. James Press, 1995. Source Database: Literature Resource Center