Sanderson holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction writing and is an independent writer. In this essay, Sanderson examines García Márquez's experimentation with time and reality in his short story.

Critics have long noted the influences of many modern fiction writers on Gabriel García Márquez, especially in the Colombian author's handling of the passage of time and in the depiction of reality in his stories. In Twayne's World Authors Series Online, for example, Raymond L. Williams credits García Márquez's reading during the 1940s of German novelist and short story writer Franz Kafka with his discovery "that literature can not only reflect reality but also permit the invention of reality; fiction can not only present moral problems in social contexts but also place into question the matter of reality itself." Deborah Cohn, in her...