The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship

 -Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Theme:

The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship is a story of magic realism by a Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The writer has used magic and reality with the stream of consciousness technique in the story. The fragmented thoughts, feelings, and emotions are expressed on real and fictitious ground in the story. This describes the growth of an ordinary boy to an assertive young man through his observation and experience.

Summary:

At present the boy has become a bold man and he wants to show how he has changed from his childhood. He is saying that now people will believe him, but in the past they did not.

Many years before, he had seen a strange ship passing by his village. The ship was large and tall but it had no lights and sound. He saw it in March at night but it disappeared when the lights of the beacon (guiding light that goes on and off) fell on it. It moved to the sand-bank, ran on the ground, broke up and sank without sound. The next day the boy knew that it was his dream so he did not tell anyone about it.

In March, exactly one year later during the night, the boy saw the same thing. He told his mother about it when he found himself awake. She did not believe him and thought that he was becoming crazy. The boy's father had died 11 years ago. Since then the mother spent all of her time sitting in a chair and thinking about her dead husband. Now the mother's chair was 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 also went with his mother to a fair. When they were going by a boat, the mother showed the boy that there was no broken ship at the bottom of the sea.

The boy believed that the ship was real and it would come again next year. The mother promised to watch the ship next year. That night the mother died in her new chair. In the course of time, four other women also died sitting in the same chair. The chair was thought to be a bad omen by all the villagers. They threw it into the sea. 

Now the boy was orphan. As an orphan, he did not live by charity. Instead, he stole the fish to live. On the same night in March a few years later, when he was rowing in a stolen boat, the boy saw the big ship again.. He called the villagers to see the ship. But when the people got up, the ship had already broken and sank into the sea. They saw nothing and being angry they beat the boy for lying.

One year later on the same night in March the boy stole a boat so that he could get near the big ship. He took the boat to where he had seen the ship in the past. When the ship arrived, the boy lighted 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. The people of the village woke up and came out of their houses. The ship came onto the ground by the village and stops moving in front of the church. It was 20 times taller than the steeple and some ninety-seven times longer than the village with its name written in iron letters: Halalcsillag. Now they saw the ship and believed the boy. He felt happy. Now he could prove himself as an assertive young man.

In this way, the story shows the transformation of a fanciful boy into bold and courageous man. As an ordinary boy he imagined different things. He was confused by emotion and frightened by miracle. But when he was beaten and isolated he becomes strong to prove his adulthood. As a result, he drags the ship and makes people surprise.

 Question-answers:

1. Narrate the story of a boy's growth from an ordinary boy to an assertive young man.

 Ans:- The sight of the huge ship is only the symbolic of the boy's greater and greater maturity and the development of his state of mind. His encounter with the ghost ship is linked with his movement towards his maturity and will-power. When he sees a big ocean liner and informs the villagers about its arrival, they don't believe him because they can't see any ship there. Although he's beaten, he's so confident that he thinks one day he'll definitely prove his merit and maturity.

The ship isn't real. It is only the symbolic representation of the growth of an ordinary boy to an assertive young man. It presents the boy's inner journey from his innocence to experience and from ignorance to knowledge. The experience and knowledge are inevitable to gain manhood. The ship that appears and vanishes several times stands for the child's imagination and growing vision, which finally makes him a strong man with strong voice and confidence. In fact, this story brings out the boy's inner consciousness. The whole story is a psychological study which describes the boy's gradual attainment towards maturity. Thus the story deals with the mental growth of the child in proportion with his physical growth. Both the growths combined make him confident about what he says and does.

Actually it is a story about the powerful imagination of the boy. Sometimes a person’s creative power becomes so sharp that he can see his vision in concrete form. A normal mind with limited power of creativity hardly sees such picture.

2. What does the refrain of the boy ''Now they are going to see who I'm'' mean?

Ans:- The incidents of the story develop with the interior monologue of the protagonist. Mental moment is forwarded. The grand triumph feeling of the boy about the private vision upon disbelievers is internally related with the journey and visions are also his private feelings. The boy feels with strong desire to get success over the disbelievers when they beat him about his false shouting of the ship.

The refrain is the powerful expression in the story. As the story is written in the "Stream of Consciousness" style, it captures the flow of the consciousness. The narrator reports what passes in the mind of the boy as he brings the largest ship, ever existed anywhere, to the village. He is telling again and again that he has been misunderstood and misjudged. He makes many attempts but fails to prove himself until the end when he is able to show the huge ocean liner to the people. He now is fully convinced and determined of his own power when he sees the ship. So he says, 'Now they're going to see who I am'.

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Textual answers

Understanding and interpretation

 1. The story traces the development of a boy from his childhood into maturity as the story develops in chronological order. With the chronological order, he encounters with the ghost ship many times. When he saw the ship at first, he thought it was only a dream. When he saw next time, he told his mother and compelled her to see the ghost ship with him the following year. Unfortunately, she died before the time came. So, he was hated by the people. He didn’t want to get any charity so he stole fish from the boat and sold them. Once he shouted seeing the ghost ship but the villagers beat him so he got angry and made a strong decision to meet the ghost ship anyhow. He stole a boat and went to the beach of the sea and waited for her. After all, he was able to meet the ship and thinking very seriously, he made a trick and lit a lantern to control the ghost ship. Magically, the ship came under his control and he led it to his village where he was beaten. At last, he carried it to the village and the villagers became surprised what it really was.

As he was a small boy, he couldn’t recognize and know the real existence of the ship but at last he made a strong decision and plan to meet the ship anyhow and expose him really who he was. He got success with his immaturity. The success and maturity developed are interrelated. He could solve the mystery with his courage and idea which is the result of his maturity. No one else knew the existence of the ship because it was the boy’s imagination. When he saw the great whale, he shouted as if the miraculous ship appeared there but it was not reality.  

2.  I mean the boy’s newly discovered ability to control the ship’s moment is his ability to control his imagination and his concept. His strong feeling and rage arise due to beating and hatred. He comes to take revenge with the villagers and wants to show his strong power of imagination. 

3.  The protagonist is asserting that he brings the largest ocean liner into his village which pours his strong, imaginative production. At first, he imagines the ship which leads him to expose in the real world. He shouts once about the ship, he is beaten and hated so his dim imagination comes to be strong and he wants to show his all power to the villagers. So he imagines the large ship to be brought into the village publicly.

 Style and rhetorics  

 1. Stream of consciousness reveals the psychological process of the protagonist in writing. Character’s thoughts and feelings play important roles to develop the incidents. The sensitive description proceeds without plot and logical sequences. On the basis of this story, we can find the boy’s thoughts and imaginations prolonged for pages. We can’t analyze the sentence because of fluctuation of the thoughts of the character. The incidents are led by the boy’s thoughts. It does not pay attention to the realities. When we read the story, we don’t find the real and dream explanations. Only thoughts and feelings can be expressed through such style but dialogue, explanation, idea exchange would resist treatment in the style.

2.  As the story is in the style of stream of consciousness, the phrase “Now they are going to see who I am” is the boy’s strong and constant thought which is reoccurring again and again. The refrain helps the whole story to be well organized in consequence of the events. The word ‘now’ reminds that the character is challenged to anyone because they are not regarding his capacity. The word has revealed his mental depression by antagonist in the story. For the more clarification of the same statement we can remember the following examples – ‘his voice was blows and left him twisted – he would not let himself confused by emotion…etc.’

Here ‘they’ means the villagers and disbelievers who beat him and hated him. Those persons upon whom the boy wants to take revenge are ‘they’ (them) who are cowards. 

3. In the description of the ghost ship, we cannot find clear distinction between the reality and the fantasy. There are other cases too where we can’t find clear differences, such as,… …gloomy beams transfigured the village into a incompetent of glowing house and streets of violence deserts every fifteen seconds,… …to stay very late on the beach to listen to the wind’s might harp,… …the soundest sleeping dragons in the prehistoric jungle that began with the last streets of the village and ended on the other side of the world, The above descriptions are very lively and realistic description.  

4.  The writer presents the description of concrete and visual details in the story. What the boatman really saw in the sea was “the lovemaking of Manta says in a spring time sponges, pink snappers and blue corvine diving into the other wells of softer waters that were among the waters, and even the wandering hairs of victims of downing in some colonial shipwreck…” This type of description is very much realistic.  

 Discussion 

1.  As it is written in the style of stream of consciousness, it doesn’t focus on the other experience of the protagonists, which is the main characteristic of such style. The story focuses only on the main characters’, internal thoughts and feelings. In such style of writing, outer experience, dialogue, objective descriptions are not used. The incidents of the story develop with the interior monologue of the protagonist. Mental moment is forwarded. The grand triumph feeling of the boy about the private vision upon disbelievers is internally related with the journey and visions are also his private feelings. The boy feels with strong desire to get success over the disbelievers when they beat him about his false shouting of the ship. 

The End